The title of the 1996 Spanish thriller Tesis (“Thesis”) refers to the project that drives the film, a research paper on media violence by a graduate student who’s simultaneously repulsed and seduced by the topic. But it could apply just as much to the film itself, a precocious debut feature by 23-year-old writer-director Alejandro Amenábar, who later made a name for himself with smart, stylish genre revampings like 1997’s Open Your Eyes (remade as Vanilla Sky) and 2001’s The Others. For better or worse, Tesis feels very much like the product of a movie-crazed film-school grad who strives for a profound statement on society’s sick obsession with violence, but succeeds more at aping Hitchcock (via Brian De Palma), Dario Argento, and other genre maestros. It’s a critique of exploitation that—ironically, and perhaps inevitably—gratifies its audience’s bloodlust and opens up Spanish cinema to the Hollywood commercialization it explicitly decries.
