In Death Has No Master, Asia Argento stars as an anxious foreigner in Venezuela. Her character, Caro, is on a harried mission to reclaim inherited property from the local caretakers who still reside there. That’s the setup in a surrealist psychological thriller, in which Venezuelan-Canadian film-maker Jorge Thielen Armand unpacks personal history alongside deep-rooted and “eternal” tensions that still affect the country today.
“The film has multiple layers of meaning,” says Armand, ahead of the film’s premiere in the director’s fortnight section at Cannes. “Recent events only make those multitudes greater.”
Armand is fielding questions surrounding the US incursion in Venezuela, which began with Trump sending warships to the area last August, ostensibly to fight drug trafficking, just as production began on Death Has No Master.
In January, the US arrested Venezuela’s 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,” says Armand, on a video call alongside Argento. “I think that the movie can speak to the collective darkness that Venezuelans feel, and the betrayal of domestic and international systems.”
With Death Has No Master, Armand is returning to the same terrain he explored nearly a decade ago, in his feature debut La Soledad, a portrait of struggle and desperation in Venezuela during the country’s economic collapse. Armand shot the earlier film, which blurs the boundaries between documentary and fiction, at the dilapidated mansion his family owned. One of its occupants, José, lived there with his wife, daughter and grandmother, who once worked as a maid to Armand’s family before they abandoned the property. The film follows José’s ordeal when the property his family is squatting in is set to be torn down and sold.
Armand flips the perspective over to the landowners in Death Has No Master, which is partly inspired by a recurring dream. In it, Armand is roaming a dark abandoned building, where people are partying and taking drugs, while he searches for something uncertain; perhaps an exit or a hiding place. “When I wake up, I think of home and everything I left behind,” says Armand. “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 very first frames, Death Has No Master is suspended in a foreboding, abstract, dream-like state. Time feels collapsed. The colonial past occupies the present. The cacao beans are as menacing a symbol of riches and historical violence as the oil refinery thundering away in the distance.
That’s the setting Argento’s Caro enters, in somewhat of a somnambulist state herself. She’s an Italian-Venezuelan, retreating from her life abroad for reasons unspoken, returning to the plantation she has inherited from her father. Caro moves awkwardly through the antiquated spaces, as if 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 currently staking her own claim to the property with her young son.
“I drove myself pretty much insane,” says Argento of her immersion into the environment, a process that involved living in isolation in the locations where they shot. “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. She’s the daughter of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento and actor and screenwriter Daria Nicolodi, the duo behind the giallo classic Suspiria. Argento doesn’t specify the ways in which Caro’s father resonates, but describes being touched by Armand’s film, and the ways he grapples with the complicated legacy he has inherited, 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.”
I point out to Argento that the bursts of horror and violence in Death Has No Master feel as if they could be inspired by her parent’s films, as if that too is part of the inheritance. “I know,” she agrees, perking up and amused. “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.”
Argento speaks about finding those emotional and thematic connections as if they were ways to overcome how difficult it was for her to play this character, whose “infantile ego” and “sense of ownership” she says she found “disquieting to live with”.
That’s the challenge Armand set out for himself with Death Has No Master. “I wanted to make something where nobody is a victim, per se,” he says, complicating simple and digestible moral binaries by keeping his 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.”