Tésis is a film which has acquired the notoriety it clearly sought. A great, if underdeveloped premise, has Angela, a female film student writing a thesis about violence in cinema, leading her to search for illicit, unwatchable material. So far so engaging. Thereafter, perhaps too soon, she discovers that the source of the worst of this material lurks within the university where she studies. The film then becomes an investigative cat-and-mouse game: will the killer get to her before she can discover and reveal him? There is quite a lot of random pursuits and false leads, although some of the plot twists are entirely predictable. Curiously for a film that would appear to be suggesting a critique of Hollywood storytelling, with the villain of the piece saying in one of the film’s most interesting scenes that the Spanish film industry needs to ape the North Americans and give the public what they want, the film then seems to take on his advice. Instead of taking us to the heart of the problem (and perhaps discovering why Angela is so interested in this subject), it embarks on the kind of roundabout story beats which would not be out of place in the concluding episodes of a supposedly gripping Netflix series. There are moments where the darkness the film purports to reveal shine through, as in the closing hospital sequences where patients gaze like drug addicts at the titillating violence on their TV screens, but these moments are interspersed with the generic jokey tone of the Scream franchise.
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