QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Pilar Boyle and Mariano Asseff’s A Sip of Hell begins with BDSM. A riding crop lands repeatedly on the raw-red buttocks of Niko (Boyle, excellent), bent over on all fours. Then the crop’s wielder Yoki (Julieta Lloret) removes the gag from Niko’s mouth, and says (in French), “From the top, one more time”, causing Niko to recite poetic lines about her own abjection while still being whipped. It is hard to know whether this sequence, with its unnatural pink and blue lighting, and with the francophone Yoki sporting a bizarre white-haired fringe that, helmet-like, covers the entire top half of her face including her eyes, is real, or an event being imagined by Niko. Yet what does seem clear is that Niko is an actress, and that she regards her profession as something that causes, even, her pain and humiliation, and her submission to the will of another. “Beast is who is born from their own womb,” she says, “and gives birth to themselves” – and in a sense, the whole film will track Nico’s recreation of herself for her next rôle.

“I want a project that makes me feel something,” Niko tells her manager Andrea (Paula Fernández Mbarak). Though Niko has regular work in a TV comedy series, she feels that she is not being stretched in any way, and longs to do something more challenging. Andrea thinks that she has the perfect answer: a screenplay for a debut feature. “You go to the delta house,” she advises her client, “You clear your head, you read it calmly.” So Niko does just that, retreating from her city apartment to her quiet holiday house on the river far away, where she starts to read through the strange script, and to work herself into a rôle that she initially finds alien, playing an abusive mother. Yet she is interrupted almost immediately by the arrival of Rafael (Ignacio Torres), carrying a fish in hand as an offering for their dinner – and this odd, oddly insistent man imposes himself, overstays his welcome and keeps suggesting that Niko let him inside her and carry his child.

Meanwhile Niko has mannered dreams in which she encounters the mysterious Yoki, gets covered in blood and shit, is used and abused by strangers, and appears alone on stage before an invisible if noisy audience. This is a woman being left to her own devices, and finding her way into an unfamiliar rôle as a mother, even as she questions who she herself is in this part written by someone else. So these are the agonies and ecstasies of an actress in crisis, who knows that to becomes her character she must also lose herself. A Sip of Hell is a hallucinatory trip into its protagonist’s angst-driven headspace.

Niko’s interactions with Yoki and Rafa, both in fact internal dialogues, reveal a woman who, as in the opening scene, is caught in the bonds of her personal identity and physical body while struggling to transcend them. As a psychodrama in which nothing really happens and only the protagonist’s mind is active, this does at times feel untethered from reality and a bit aimless in its narrative direction, even if it remains an unusual, surreal portrait of a lady confronted with self-expression, self-abnegation and liberation through her artistic process. Yet like that river down which she will eventually travel, this meanders – as though Niko’s misadventures in method could go on indefinitely without ever really getting anywhere. At least now Niko is in motion, in contrast with her stagnant state at the film’s beginning.

A Sip of Hell had its world première at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival 2024.