A haunting trance film structured around the enigmatic journey of a newly released convict through the sweltering heart of the jungle, Los Muertos reveals Alonso’s uncanny power to engage and open the viewer’s imagination through the subtlest of means. Alonso’s extraordinary second feature evokes Point Blank (1968) with its hypnagogic, deadpan thriller of a phantasmagorical hunter tormented by the specter of his past. In Los Muertos’ bravura opening sequence – a soaring traveling camera gliding through the jungle over fallen, lifeless bodies – Alonso announces the dream logic that shrouds the film in mystery and pushes beyond the documentary fiction defined by his first film, La Libertad, while also refining the richly detailed observational mode of the early work.

Alsonso offers an offbeat and wonderfully bizarre commentary on his singular filmmaking practice in his self-reflexive featurettewhich finds Argentino Vargas, the star of Los Muertos, wandering through the Teatro San Martin—the Buenos Aires home theater of the Cinemateca Argentina—in search of the film’s premiere. As Alonso’s camera slowly floats through the shadowy bowels of the building, striping bare the dingy backstage of the cultural apparatus, Fantasma offers a spirited commentary on the theatricality of even the most rigorously non-professional performance and of the cinematic ritual itself.