This low-budget homage to “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “I Am Toxic” (“Soy Tóxico“) has all the typical dystopian traits: arid wastelands, sepia tones, gruff apocalyptic shouting. Under clear influence from George A. Romero and Joe Dante, South American horror stalwarts Pablo Parés and Daniel de la Vega have produced a hostile imaginary, an Argentina both primitive and futuristic. The return to the state of nature is infused with dilapidated machinery, the Hobbesian free-for-all manifest through vicious gangs and, more worryingly, hordes of mindless zombies. The anxiety of encroachment persists. This knowingly silly B-movie has obvious genre appeal but little merit elsewhere. Scene pacing, editing, sound design, fight choreography, plot: these elements are mostly inconsistent, producing sequences at once shoddy, sluggish and perplexing.
Esteban Prol plays the aging, decrepit wretch crawling in the desert, apparently rescued by Horacio Fontova’s wizened chief, the papa of a surviving misfit cohort. Gastón Cocchiarale and Sergio Podelei both amuse as his variously ludicrous and malevolent underlings, one wide-eyed and oafish, the other caffeinated and excitable. Fini Bocchino plays the young woman — a stand-in for Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa — groped and subjugated by her feverish colleagues.
Empowerment is found through murder and depravity. The young woman takes pity on the weakened newcomer, but why? There seems little immediate connection. A lot seems to rest on categorization, on whether you’re deemed ‘wet’ or ‘dry’ — or worse, on the trajectory in between. The gang-mates are gleefully mad from dirt and destitution, and seek to berate, punish and torture those near complete dehydration. They even come for your toes. Maybe the undead aren’t so bad, after all!
The ‘us versus them’ political allegory is admirably thrust onto the narrative with little care or attention. The gang owns a pig called Donald, for instance, which offers a character arc worth pursuing. We’re left with an unfortunate lack of closure for our porcine pal. Did he just run off? Perhaps this articulates a singularly South American response to current Western geopolitics. The barely-humans face entertaining and gruesome comeuppance, while there is an outrageously left-field explanation for one character’s paternal affection. Revelations are laughingly divulged.
Apparently, frantic chase sequences seem to reach about 20 miles per hour. A particularly blunt composition has a woman hanging from a rope, modified into a swinging piñata for battle purposes. The reasoning for getting to this point is frankly delirious. The lethargic mass of unsentient limbs cast a dreadful pall over the group. The lifeless are rendered as crusty, torpid, and little else. Threats also come from internal desires: to succumb to madness, hunger, nihilism. Within this barbarity, from where does hope stem?
As an exercise in genre tropes, “I Am Toxic” will undoubtedly delight enthusiasts. Grisly ends, macho posturing, cursory emotional subplots: all are registered in attendance. This is cheap, cheerful, self-referential cinema with little need — and no request — to apply theory or insight. So here goes. It’s about the young woman: her stoicism, her wavering but fundamental decency, her reconciliation with pain and betrayal. Foregrounded is her defiance. The camera ogles her sufficiently before allowing redemption, allowing her the privilege of last person standing while all others face reckoning. We consider her final smirk in context: freedom, yes, but in a world of toxicity. What a bizarre way to get there. [D+]