MIFF play #8: DOMINGO AND THE MIST

Domingo wanders through his days in his small Costa Rican village, tending to his dairy cows and talking to the others about whether they will sell their land to the developers who are building a highway through the district. One by one, the villagers succumb, taking the money and leaving, persuaded by a gang of thugs hired to help negotiations with nocturnal violence. Domingo plans to stand his ground, regardless of the apparent futility of it, and turns to his own firepower for help. Throughout these events, he is visited at night by a mist that crawls through the door or seeps between the wooden slats of his house which he talks to as his deceased wife and who sometimes talks herself.

This solid example of slow cinema takes more than a leaf out of the book of retired Hungarian master Bela Tarr in using long takes of characters walking, sitting or working as the audience is implicitly invited to project thoughts on to them. Domingo knows his reckoning will come and hears the gunshots and explosions happen around him like footfalls coming his way. Through an insistence on the limits of this enclosed small world with its fresh green jungles and plain but clean houses we are left with the choice the characters face as the sole question of their lives and that the world beyond this one will be a step downward. Domingo's wife, her voice increasingly dour as the mist, offers no comfort beyond the invitation for him to join her.

If you were to expect a raging plot of David vs a corporate Goliath with a big final showdown, this approach would drag but this film is all about the days that stretch and the approach of their end, whether it be through taking the package or giving into an accelerated mortality. And if we feel frustration at Domingo's stubborn stance, if we think it's the nightly spirits he barters from the local moonshiner, or more plainly, the life he has made his own here in the mountains, spare, simple, arduous but satisfying his situation has proven impossible to resolve without force. This is how the even pacing works so well, here, the days, the work and the natural beauty offer no acceptable alternative. The movie, beautiful to see and terrible to contemplate, is the message.