Movie Review: Embrace of the Serpent (Spanish)

Embrace
of the Serpent

Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente in Spanish), directed by Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra, is a searing jungle adventure (or a nightmare) spectacularly shot in monochrome. While last year's Oscar for the best foreign language film went to the extraordinary and well-deserved Hungarian Holocaust drama Son of Saul, this movie is no slouch either. For it is so utterly immersive, transportive and transformative a journey of self-discovery, you cannot help but surrender to it and embrace it in its entirety. At a surface level, the events in the film unfold against the mystical surroundings of Amazonia, with the serpentine river snaking its way through the dense infinite jungle, providing the ultimate means of sustenance to the natives and every life-form that inhabits the impenetrable rainforest.

But the Amazon is also much more than that, bearing testimonies to the dark days of unchecked colonialism, the irreparable damage the "white" invaders from the East caused to the ecosystem and the aboriginal culture, by not just despoiling the nature they worshipped, but by also depriving the indigenous people of their very access to life and eventually marginalising them. Director Ciro Guerro beautifully explores all these and a lot more — like those observations about materialism, culture clash and its corruption at the hands of Christian missionaries — by interweaving two voyages along the river, one in 1909 and the second, three decades later in 1940, undertaken by a German ethnographer and an American botanist (the movie is inspired by the diaries written by the two scientists during their field work in the Amazon), both of whom embark in search of a sacred (fictional) healing plant yakruna, accompanied by a reluctant but worldly wise Amazonian shaman, Karamakate, the last known survivor of his tribe.