What happens when you make a superhero film with the means, the fury and the look of a punk band from the outskirts of a Chilean city? Matapanki, the raging black-and-white debut by Diego “Mapache” Fuentes, has the answer: a drunken, defiant and surprisingly tender film about a punk who gets his superpowers from cheap booze.
First things first. A matapanki is not some mythical elixir. It is Chilean street slang for what you get when you tip everything left in the house into one bottle. Beer, wine, spirits, dregs, whatever is going. Cheap, effective and merciless. The name also reads as “punk killer”, and in this film you are welcome to take that literally.
Ricardo (Ramón Gálvez) is exactly the sort of punk who would drink it. He drinks, he hangs around at gigs and he roams the outskirts with his two best friends, Mella and Claudia. Behind the tough exterior there is something fragile: at home he looks after his grandmother, María Luisa, the only steady thing in his chaotic life. Then, on one heavy night out, he tries the notorious brew and discovers it gives him superpowers. Every sip makes him stronger.
What follows is the dilemma every superhero film knows, only a good deal grubbier. Should Ricardo use his powers to change society? And what happens when rage and drink take the wheel? One reckless decision leads to a brutal, irreversible mistake, and before he knows it Ricardo finds himself at the centre of an international conflict.
The film is shot in grainy black and white by Vicente Correa, who catches the raw, kinetic energy of punk. Halfway through, the film tips into comic-book territory: action in stylised bursts, as if you were flicking through the panels of a photocopied fanzine. This is DIY cinema in the best sense, where a lack of budget is not a handicap but an attitude.
That fits the way the film came about. Matapanki started life as a university graduation project, with a cast and crew who had mostly never made anything before. Fuentes calls it a punk manifesto, written out of the anger of a generation that took to the streets. And sure enough, beneath the superhero gags there is a satire on corruption and foreign meddling that is anything but subtle. Subtlety is not the point here. Good satire has to land and it has to be funny, and this one does both.
Even so, Matapanki is more than a burst of rage. Between the violence and the hangovers, the film keeps returning to that small house, to grandmother María Luisa, to the tenderness Ricardo can barely bring himself to show. That is where its real strength lies: a film that dares to be loud, ugly and blind drunk, and still knows exactly where it hurts. Seventy-one minutes of hangover, and you will want another sip straight away.
