‘Don’t talk to strangers’, by James Watkins | film criticism

Although the movie Don’t talk to strangers It is entertaining, it is worth thinking about the power that English cinema has to reconstruct any story and reduce it to its minimum expression. And it is that even though Don’t talk to strangers sold as a premiere, it is actually the adaptation of a brilliant Danish film: Gæsternewritten by Christian Tafdrup and his brother Mads Tafdrup.

With this adaptation the same thing happens as with The garden teacheran Israeli work that he directed Nadav Latip in 2014 and that Hollywood disfigured in 2018 with The Kindergarten Teacher. Or when the novelist John Ajvide Lindqvist He became so famous for the adaptation of his novel let me in that he was able to sell his rights so that the United States could make a putrid horror movie.

In short, thinking about this power to destroy the personal stories of so many artists and make artificially flavored films with them, one comes to the conclusion that there are few artists who would not sell themselves. I have heard two Mexican directors who consider it a triumph that an American producer has approached them to offer them money for the rights to adapt films that also concern their creators a lot. And worse, finally the Californian producers did not even continue negotiations. They gave up on the Mexican directors in whom they had shown interest like a meat buyer who feels he is paying too much for a Chamorro that is not juicy enough. And yet, the creators of both national films were proud to have received the offer. They both still presume it. And they raise their tequila horses. Hollywood, they presume, is like Midas.

I suspect it’s exactly the other way around. This is confirmed by this adaptation of Don’t talk to strangersWell, as I said, it is entertaining but only because there is something in the background of the original story that revolves around a very conventional family that during a trip to Italy meets a couple who has a child who cannot speak. because he was born with a tongue that was too small. And the conventional family is about to join the child of these new friends on a journey that takes them from the city to the countryside, from civilization to barbarism, from the fears of the bourgeoisie to the reality of a wild wilderness.

In the Danish film, for example, the woman of the unconventional family is practically disguised as Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. With this detail, a political parable is produced from the image, directed at those who believe that Europe is an Eden without understanding that it is also Hades. Now, narrating the ending would be too brutal an act because yes, if what you want is to spend a rainy afternoon at the movies, Don’t talk to strangers It’s not bad, but if one managed to see Christian Tafdrup’s original one would find something as bizarre but important as funny gamesthis criticism of horror films and the people who like to see them.

The joke with funny games It goes to the point that when they approached Michael Haneke Americans to ask for an adaptation, he granted it in exchange for directing it himself. This is the only case in which a creator has managed to mock the innocence of those who think that only American cinema has value, take the money and get away with it after selling himself.

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