Fantasia 2020: La Dosis
Over the course of a year, spanning from July 2017 to June 2018, nursing assistant Reta Mays killed seven patients at a veterans' hospital in West Virginia. In another horrifying case, Niels Högel, a nurse in Germany, was sentenced to life in prison after murdering 85 patients under his care between 2000-2005. And, perhaps the most infamous of all these cases, Charles Cullen of New Jersey, confessed to taking 40 lives during his tenure as a nurse at various hospitals in the state. Investigators on his case estimate, however, that he may be responsible for up to 400 deaths during his career.
Martín Kraut's debut, hospital ward thriller La Dosis (The Dose), is a chilly, pallid picture that invokes the senseless terror of these cases to conjure a horror film with no ghosts, ghouls, or demons which is, nonetheless, inhabited by true monsters. It concerns Marcos (Carlos Portaluppi), a seasoned nurse at a provincial private clinic, and Gabriel (Ignacio Rogers), a new nurse just joining the ward, who charms his new colleagues with his warm presence and thoughtful patient care. All the patients, nurses, and physicians melt in his presence, save for Marcos, who bristles. We don't know quite why yet, but Gabriel's magnanimous and jovial (but not bubbly) presence seems a compensation for some dark secret. When a local traffic accident floods the intensive care unit with new patients, we come to learn that Marcos, out of pity, euthanizes patients in terminal condition. His late shifts leave him ample room and time to slink to the patients' bedsides and kill them in their sleep. But, when Gabriel begins dosing patients out of sociopathy, Marcos is powerless to stop Gabriel for, if revealed, his transgressions threaten to tie a noose around his own neck.
Kraut's narrative is twisty and exciting enough, even if its broad strokes are a bit predictable; blackmail thrillers are at least as old as the ‘frame job’ noir in film, and in literature, a great deal older than that. But, La Dosis is kept fresh and exciting largely on the backs of its sublime two central performances. Portaluppi and Rogers' work is subtle without ever feeling inert. Rogers has the flashier of the two roles, surreptitiously showcasing his handiwork to Portaluppi's Marcos in boastful displays of psychopathy. But, Portaluppi's tormented Marcos is equally compelling. Much of his journey centers around his conflict over consequence and murderous kinship. One element of his interior conflict which develops gradually, but comes to fruition in the second act, however, is far less compelling. To spoil it here would reveal a pivotal plotpoint, so I won't. But, suffice it to say this beat plays into tired tropes and stale stereotypes as old as noir. It's doubly frustrating because Portaluppi and Rogers fill out their roles with such versatility, revealing new layers to these characters so compellingly that, even as the picture sags in the middle third, their electric chemistry generates the power to keep the narrative wheels spinning. So it is annoying that some of that work is for naught when writer-director Martín Kraut feels the need to jam in such a lazy trope so unnecessarily.
Visually, like the performances, this is a subtle, but handsome picture. Cinematographer Gustavo Biazzi lenses the film in a persistent, sickly green. Every shot includes the hue; from the nurses' faded scrubs, to the sweaty walls of the ward, to the pale summer grass that greets Marcos after his exhausting night shifts. Its artful presence begins to, expertly, grate and by the end, its nauseating persistence seems a cosmic retribution for Marcos' sins or a sick joke orchestrated by Gabriel. The sets here are, otherwise, minimalist, bereft of similarly evocative flourishes. This wisely keeps the focus squarely on the central duo's locked horns. The score, by Juan Tobal, is an interesting mash, if somewhat unremarkable in its component parts: classically thriller strings dissolve into a jazzy mash of percussion and horns. But, Kraut keeps most of the picture unscored, electing to let the central drama lead the picture; a wise choice. La Dosis is a more-than-worthy watch. And, at a breezy ninety minutes, it doesn't overstay its welcome nor will it take much of your time. I hope it gets some much-deserved attention in this theater-less, video-on-demand era we now live in.
