A raging tempest dramatically releases a beautiful and deranged young inmate from her cell and into the ranch home of an unsuspecting wealthy landowner family in Buñuel’s little known Susana. Never explaining the malady nor the motives of his bewitching heroine as she sets out to systematically wreck the family from within, Buñuel erects his first dark monument to the dangerous powers of female sexuality in this study of willfully destructive desire. Susana showcases the subversive mode of genre cinema that is a signature of Buñuel’s Mexican films, with Buñuel here deconstructing the family melodrama, revealing each of its archetypical characters – the tiring patriarch, the protective mother, the sheltered son and scion – to be paper thin constructions, brittle kindling for the young woman’s gleeful flame. A fascinating companion piece to Pasolini’s Teorema and Buñuel’s later Belle de Jour, Susana simultaneously reads as a black comedy and a devastating critique of the Mexican family.