In Death Has No Master, Asia Argento plays Caro, an anxious Italian-Venezuelan woman on a harried mission to reclaim inherited property from the local caretakers who still live there. The setup belongs to a surrealist psychological thriller from Venezuelan-Canadian filmmaker Jorge Thielen Armand, who unpacks personal history alongside deep-rooted and “eternal” tensions still plaguing Venezuela today.
“The film has multiple layers of meaning,” Armand says ahead of its premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight section at Cannes. “Recent events only make those multitudes greater.” Those events include the US incursion in Venezuela, which began with Trump sending warships last August ostensibly to fight drug trafficking - just as production started on Death Has No Master. In January, the US arrested authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro, whose government has been accused of political corruption and human rights violations, while seizing control of the country and its oil industry, which many believe was the agenda all along. “It’s very worrisome, what’s happening,” Armand says on a video call with Argento. “I think that the movie can speak to the collective darkness that Venezuelans feel, and the betrayal of domestic and international systems.”
Death Has No Master is Armand’s return to terrain he explored nearly a decade ago in his feature debut La Soledad, a portrait of struggle and desperation during Venezuela’s economic collapse. That film, which blurs documentary and fiction, was shot at the dilapidated mansion his family owned, where one occupant, José, lived with his wife, daughter, and grandmother - a former maid to Armand’s family before they abandoned the property. La Soledad follows José’s ordeal when the squatted property is set to be torn down and sold. Now Armand flips perspective to the landowners, partly inspired by a recurring dream of roaming a dark abandoned building where people party and take drugs while he searches for something uncertain. “When I wake up, I think of home and everything I left behind,” he says. “So the film is that nightmare of going back, finding that the people and things you left behind are no longer there; as if the version of yourself left behind is rotting from the inside out.”
From its first frames, Death Has No Master is suspended in a foreboding, abstract, dream-like state where time feels collapsed. The colonial past occupies the present. Cacao beans are as menacing a symbol of riches and historical violence as the oil refinery thundering away in the distance. Into this setting walks Argento’s Caro, in somewhat of a somnambulist state herself - an Italian-Venezuelan retreating from her life abroad for unspoken reasons, returning to the plantation she inherited from her father. She moves awkwardly through antiquated spaces, stricken with fear because the environment holds personal and historical traumas, but fuelled by a legally binding sense of entitlement. She alternately cowers from and hovers over Sonia (Dogreika Tovar), the Afro-Venezuelan caretaker staking her own claim with her young son.
“I drove myself pretty much insane,” Argento says of her immersion into the environment, which involved living in isolation in the shooting locations. “And I had a lot of fear; something primal; something unspeakable that I think my character felt in going back there. I don’t really have a way to intellectualise it, to verbalise it. A lot of it had to do with my unconscious, and my own history, in a way that became parallel to that of Caro, my character.” Argento explains that Caro’s late father - an abusive figure haunting her memories - “has aspects” of her own famous parents: Italian horror maestro Dario Argento and actor-screenwriter Daria Nicolodi, the duo behind giallo classic Suspiria. She doesn’t specify the ways Caro’s father resonates but describes being touched by Armand’s film because the emotions dovetail with her own. “It’s dealing with my own nightmares, and my own childhood, and the way I was brought up, and my own blood, and my inheritance.”
When I point out that the bursts of horror and violence feel inspired by her parents’ films, Argento perks up, amused: “I know. I didn’t realise this until I saw the movie. This is like a serious Italian psychological thriller from the 70s, with the zooms and the way it’s shot.” She speaks about finding those emotional and thematic connections as ways to overcome how difficult it was to play this character, whose “infantile ego” and “sense of ownership” she found “disquieting to live with.”
That’s the challenge Armand set for himself: “I wanted to make something where nobody is a victim, per se,” he says, complicating simple moral binaries by keeping characters on a level playing field. “There’s a legal, moral and historical conflict. We could say that this conflict is represented by Caro being legal; Sonia being moral; and Johnny, the Indigenous right hand of Caro’s father, [having] historical legitimacy. But these are notions that we’ve conceived as a society. In the end, land isn’t owned, ever. It’s just controlled by the use of force. It’s occupied until it’s not.”