Death Has No Master (La muerte no tiene dueño) North American première at Fantastic Fest, 18th Sept 2026
“There is no land. There is no God. There is no house. There is nothing.” So intones old Yoni (Arturo Rodríguez) at the beginning of Death Has No Master (La muerte no tiene dueño), even as we see a masked figure urge Caro (Asia Argento) to “kill” a bloodily injured soldier (David Tiburcio) lying in a stone quarry – a mercy killing that the soldier himself also begs of her. This sequence is a dream which Caro is having as she sleeps in the back of a taxi, jetlagged from having just arrived in Venezuela from Italy – but it is also a vision of sorts, and all of its elements will eventually be replayed, in radically reconstituted form, over the course of writer/director Jorge Thielen Armand’s feature.
After the death of her long-estranged father, Caro is returning to reclaim the villa and cacao plantation that was once her childhood home. “If you’re gonna sell, hurry,” advises her father’s old retainer Yoni, “because these lands swallow you up.” Yoni is something of a shaman. He recites certain phrases (like those words from the beginning of the film) like a mantra, and observes everybody, sometimes whispering to them in their sleep or even appearing in their dreams – and at a crucial juncture, he administers to Caro a herbal hallucinogen to cleanse her of her trauma and guilt in her passage to whatever is coming next.
There are others in the old, dilapidated manor house. The one-time housekeeper Sonia (Dogreika Tovar) lives there with her young son Maiko (Yermain Sequera), and in the absence of her master – Caro’s father – has made the place her own to the extent that she is even renting out rooms to a tenant (José Aponte). Sonia has usufructuary claims, and no intention of leaving – and when Caro tries to lodge a formal complaint against her for squatting, the amused local sheriff (Jericó Montilla) carefully reminds Caro: “Sonia has lived there for ages. By law, if you live somewhere for over five years, you can stay there. She has the right.” The sheriff is also quick to point out that Caro, traipsing about the small town in her father’s boots and hat, is “only missing the whip”, and that “things have changed here” since the old colonial days.
The whip will come out again, but will also be turned on its master, in a Venezuela that has more recently endured crime-riddled chaos and a corrupt police state – and, through America’s intervention this year, a return to colonial rule and the foreign appropriation of natural resources, not unlike what Sonia is trying to reimpose. After Caro has tried – and failed – to have Sonia, Maiko and the tenant removed by law, a young teenager (Cristian Araujo) watches her cross the town square and says to Maiko, “If you want, we kill her now.” Here life is cheap, Caro’s inherited privilege no longer amounts to much, and the next generation, taught violence by the last, is only too ready to engage in its own revolutionary acts of reclamation.
Caro is arrogant and entitled, yet so is Sonia, and both equally have a claim to the house. Yet as Caro and her local lawyer-cum-lover Roque (Jorge Thielen Hedderich) resort to a solution involving third-party force which quickly gets out of hand, and as Sonia escalates things further with her own local thugs (Abilio Torres, Armando Monteverdo), Armand is revealing a land ever caught in an ongoing history of violence and political struggle. Like Daniel Bandeira’s Property (Propriedade, 2022), this is a gothic family saga of social iniquity and colonial injustice, where each generation is damaged by the last, where decline and decay are built in, where gaps of class and race are not easily bridged without being exploited, and where all property is theft, even if everyone ultimately is made of the same blood and destined for the same end. That end leaves land, God and house without value or significance, and reduces all these petty squabbles to zero – yet to understand this, one must heed the spiritual perspective and insight of the psychopomp Yoni, whose calm, whispering voice is a guide through the empty noise of worldly affairs to whatever lies beyond.
strap: There is no land: in Jorge Thielen Armand’s Venezuelan gothic allegory, a deceased colonial farmer’s daughter returns to claim her contested inheritance
© Anton Bitel
