{"id":22489,"date":"2016-09-26T20:05:57","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T00:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=22489"},"modified":"2016-09-26T20:06:29","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T00:06:29","slug":"honeymoon-luna-de-miel-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/26\/honeymoon-luna-de-miel-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Honeymoon (Luna de Miel) (2015)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"honeymoon\"<\/a>Jorge kidnaps Isabel and keeps her in his basement hoping that some conditioning and Stendhal Syndrome will make her his.\u00a0 Through torture and punishment, he tries to break her. The brutal story brought to the screen here is written by Marco Tarditi Ortega and directed by Diego Cohen.\u00a0 Together they create a kidnapping story where the victim is brutalized, violated, and tortured in many varied ways.\u00a0 The film brings an imaginative array of ways to make someone suffer and bleed.\u00a0 The way it is shot is relentless, keeping the camera directly on what is happening to victim Isabel at the hands of her captor Jorge who is a medical doctor, giving him better knowledge on how to make her suffer without killing her.<\/p>\n

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He tortures her for most of the just over 90-minute runtime.\u00a0 The character of Jorge is fairly well developed, especially compared with a lot of other torturers put to film.\u00a0 He has a personality, a career, a reason for doing all of this; we even get a glimpse as to his past.\u00a0 He is however, still not fully explained to keep some sort of mystery about him.\u00a0 The character of Isabel, the victim, is a bit thinner, we know that she\u2019s a runner and is married, but that is about all we find out.\u00a0 What we know of her character is more on a mental level, that she\u2019s a fighter that she doesn\u2019t give up easily.\u00a0 She\u2019s strong, but Jorge may very well break her. These two lead characters are almost the only two on screen for the whole movie so their performances are of utmost importance.<\/p>\n

Playing Jorge is Hector Kotsifakis who gives a cold quality to his character, playing him very straight forward and unflinching, even as he puts Isabel through some very painful and gross torture.\u00a0 He stays mostly calm through it all, with Kotsifakis showing great control over his outward emotions.\u00a0 Playing Isabel is Paulina Ahmed who shows different levels of fear and suffering very well and is an apt but not weak victim.\u00a0 Her character doesn\u2019t give up and this can be seen in her eyes.\u00a0 She keeps a defiant gaze for most of her interactions with Kotsifakis\u2019 Jorge.\u00a0 She also gets to show a softer, more hopeful side in the dreams that calm her character\u2019s mind and are possibly the only reason she stays sane.\u00a0 In those dreams and in a few scenes, we get to see Isabel\u2019s husband Pablo played by a concerned Alberto Agnesi who gets only a short total screen time but leaves an impression nonetheless.<\/p>\n

Honeymoon\u2019s torture scenes are not all bloody but some are very much so.\u00a0 The special effects by Marina Alberro and Pablo Garcia with visual effects by David Guzman and Mauricio Meza are fantastic.\u00a0 Their effects on a few scenes in particular look very realistic adding an unnerving quality to these scenes beyond the simple torture happening on screen.\u00a0 Their blood usage is deliberate, plentiful when needed, and looks great on screen.<\/p>\n

Helping with this look and the general feeling of dread and helping to make the process uncomfortable, the cinematography by Aram Diaz and the music by Uriel Villalobos keep the images direct and clear for the former and add a feeling of despair for the latter.<\/p>\n

Honeymoon (Luna de Miel) is a brutal, uncomfortable watch.\u00a0 It does fit under the torture porn umbrella very well as its main horror elements are torture and pain plain and simple.\u00a0 It\u2019s not an easy watch but definitely an effective one.\u00a0 It creates discomfort, horror, dread, and a bit of gross-out which all adds up to lead the viewer to feeling dirty and unhappy.\u00a0 Which, do not get this review wrong, is the goal.\u00a0 It\u2019s effective in its brutality and as a film about the torture of one woman, not unlike many predecessors and much like Martyrs, it leaves the viewer in a weird spot mentally after watching it.\u00a0 It may not be as unrelenting and gory, but the effect is very similar and lasts after the film is turned off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jorge kidnaps Isabel and keeps her in his basement hoping that some conditioning and Stendhal Syndrome will make her his.\u00a0 Through torture and punishment, he tries to break her. The brutal story brought to the screen here is written by Marco Tarditi Ortega and directed by Diego Cohen.\u00a0 Together they create a kidnapping story where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[367,438,477,1087,1116],"class_list":["post-22489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-foreign","tag-h","tag-horror","tag-thriller","tag-torture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22489"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22491,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22489\/revisions\/22491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}