Synopsis
In a remote South American colony in the late 18th century, officer Zama of the Spanish crown waits in vain for a transfer to a more prestigious location. He suffers small humiliations and petty politicking as he increasingly succumbs to lust and paranoia.
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Cast
- Daniel Giménez CachoDon Diego de Zama
- Lola DueñasLuciana Piñares de Luenga
- Matheus NachtergaeleVicuña Porto / Gaspar Toledo
- Juan MinujínVentura Prieto
- Nahuel CanoManuel Fernández
- Mariana NunesMalemba
- Carlos DefeoEl Oriental
- Rafael SpregelburdCapitán Hipólito Parrilla
- Daniel VeroneseGobernador II
- Germán de SilvaIndalecio
Recommendations
- 100
The Guardian
[Martel's] film is haunted, haunting and admittedly prone to the occasional longueur insofar as it runs to its own peculiar rhythm; maybe even its own primal logic. - 100
Variety
The frustrating nine-year wait for new material from Martel has done nothing to blunt her exquisite, inventive command of sound and image, nor her knack for subtly violent exposure of social and racial prejudice on the upper rungs of the class ladder. - 100
Slant Magazine
How strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is also a comedy of microaggressions, built on the minor workplace humiliations of a pencil-pusher in the 1790s. - 100
The New York Times
Ms. Martel is exploring the past, how we got here and why, but she is more interested in relations of power than in individual psychological portraits. The monstrous must be humanized to be understood, which doesn’t mean it deserves our tears. - 90
Village Voice
Martel engages directly with Argentina’s colonial legacy, although her approach remains allusive and layered. She transforms Benedetto’s epic into a dizzying, sensory head trip about a man’s gradual psychological decay, allowing larger historical and political themes to emerge organically from her meticulous formal compositions. - 83
The A.V. Club
In its own befuddling, bone-dry way, this is a comedy—one that takes fiendish pleasure in puncturing the pomp and circumstance of a cog in the empire-building machine. - 83
The Playlist
The formal control is remarkable, but sometimes almost stultifying, as though Martel had spent every moment of this intervening decade plotting how to pack each scene more densely, to the point it feels like Zama” could maybe stop a bullet. It will certainly deter the less persistent viewer. - 80
Screen Daily
It’s confusing and heavy and bears down hard until a third-act swerve throws in colours and movement and spins the viewer out of the theatre in wonder. It won’t be forgotten.
