Death Has No Master

Asia Argento has given European genre cinema a face in which defiance, vulnerability and a taste for danger come together. Who could better play a woman who claims her inheritance and thereby unleashes a nightmare? In “Death Has No Master”, Caro returns to Venezuela after twenty years away to sell her late father’s cocoa plantation. But the dilapidated manor house has long since become a refuge for the former workers and their families. Sonia above all refuses to leave. What begins as a dispute over property turns into a bitter struggle over memory, power and the right to a piece of land.

Among tropical greenery and crumbling walls, the violence of earlier generations still seems to breathe in these shimmering, sombre images. The Venezuelan Jorge Thielen Armand draws on the feverish imagery of the Italian giallo, interweaving Gothic horror with a political thriller about the legacy of colonialism. Argento plays Caro as a woman who is not safe even from her own past: imperious, vulnerable, increasingly lost. But who owns a house when its existence is founded on the exploitation of others? “Death Has No Master” pushes this question to the edge of madness. A feverish nightmare of a film. A work about a past that cannot be sold.