It’s highly reductive to say, but there’s a genre in festival and arthouse cinema, and it’s simply called “Asia Argento.” The component parts include herself, a fashionable, high-ish brow, and maybe trashy auteur (Abel Ferrara, Olivier Assayas, Catherine Breillat, her own dad), a strong genre element, and dabs of very deliberate provocation. The Italian actress is, of course, associated more recently with the early years of MeToo, which saw her as one of the most virulent direct accusers of Harvey Weinstein, after which she was embroiled in misconduct allegations of her own from former actor collaborator Jimmy Bennett.
Like many from that era, best not named, Argento has been attempting a gradual comeback, with walk-ons as a literal cisman in Ferrara’s “Padre Pio,” and a nicely self-referential role in Rainer Frimmel and Tizza Covi’s great “Vera” (whose star Vera Gemma, incidentally, is mooted for a role in Sean Baker’s upcoming “Ti Amo!”). But, swerving back, Jorge Thielen Armand’s “Death Has No Master” is a 100-percent authentic “Asia Argento” film, alongside being an impressive and politically adroit genre work. And given the U.S.’ return to foreign imperialism this year, that it derives from Venezuela makes it doubly urgent, although any references it has to contemporary politics, or Maduro et al., are buried and indirect.
Armand’s previous features had prime berths as part of the Venice Biennale College cinema program and Rotterdam’s Tiger Competition, and he lands in the even more prestigious climes of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight this time. It makes sense too, as while excellent, his prior work “La Soledad” and “Fortitude” are still what regulars of the circuit sometimes ding as festival films; “Death Has No Master,” by comparison, has a far more overt genre hook, even if its pivot towards that from humid, sunburnt realism is a bit unsteady.
Argento, who diligently learned Spanish for the role, plays Caro, the daughter of a Cacao plantation owner, who lives in an unstated foreign country and now returns “home” to reclaim her inheritance. Even from her sheer pink, slogan-emblazoned t-shirt, and fashionable sunglasses, we gauge both the poised, well-presented aspects of her personality, and her utter outsider-dom, as she nurses the weight of her troubled family heritage; she both wants to settle her affairs, and exorcize any remaining trauma, especially if there’s the option to sell the property, and pocket the cash.
Arriving at the decaying mansion, which seems not too geographically distant from urban life, she finds its current caretaker Sonia (Dogreika Tovar), the daughter of her father’s former housekeeper, who is occupying it with her young son Maiko (Yermain Sequera); also present is Roque (Jorge Thielen Hedderich), who’s set up a workshop in one of its cavernous rooms, and appears to be in a relationship with Sonia, although he’s not the kid’s father. Caro and Sonia both cautiously bond over their connection to the property and the surrounding land, and commiserate on the historical forces that have placed them in opposition. Yet, for all her former liberal posturing, she wants them out, or — with most details of her past life ambiguous — seems to want the space to herself as her own mausoleum, but only to live in.
Consulting with her pragmatic lawyer and other advisors, she learns that “squatters” — an unfair and demeaning term, no question — are able to live permanently at otherwise owned properties if they’ve already been there five years. So, her strategy shifts to polite requests, and then more foreboding scenarios where her lawyer calls his security contacts — the kind who carry assault rifles over their back.
Although the film pleasingly goes full Latin-American Peckinpah — yet with a far more convincing and righteous anti-colonial streak — threaded throughout are dreamlike interludes and flashbacks that provide generational historical context to the events and intensify the atmosphere. For one, the movie’s very opening sequence shows the initial Spanish colonization of the land, but with rifle butts placed in sexually suggestive poses; Lynchian, face-covering scarves; and an observing character intoning “no land, no home, no God”. We learn that Caro’s father suffered from an unspecified mental illness, which she appears to have inherited, with distorted, queasy sound design and visual anomalies (such as on-screen figures suddenly changing place) stalking her wherever she goes, but especially “the big house”.
Assessing its distribution prospects after what should be a well-received premiere, “Death Has No Master” has something of a “tweener” feel, meaning it fits between poles of classification. It’s too bloodthirsty in its denouement to simply be a drama of postcolonial lives, as Armand’s “La Soledad” was to a tee, and it’s perhaps too slow-burning, whilst camouflaging its true nature, to be naturally appealing at genre festivals, although it could still impress in that realm. Beyond these questions of wider exposure, this emanates from the film itself, whose characterization and depth just don’t convince as much as its atmospherics. Or to sound more Gen Z, if we wish, its impeccably bad vibes.
Grade: B
“Death Has No Master” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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