Independent, The (London): FILM: Thank your lucky stars

INTACTO (15)

DIRECTOR Juan Carlos Fresnadillo STARRING Leonardo Sbaraglia / Eusebio Poncela / Max von Sydow

108 MINS

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo's debut film Intacto is part-thriller and part-meditation on fate and luck, intermittently baffling but wholly remarkable. Just as it seems you have its meaning in your grasp, it wriggles free and loses you again. From its opening shot of a casino isolated in a desert landscape the film feels always at one remove from the world, a sensation heightened by the mystical touch that links one character to another and the perilous games of chance they are driven to play.

The film, written by Fresnadillo and Andres M Koppel, hinges on the central conceit that luck is a gift to be hoarded, bargained with, or stolen. It muses upon how the lives of four disparate characters intersect through the unfathomable endowment of good fortune. The saturnine Federico (Eusebio Poncela) has worked at a casino as the protege of its ageing owner, Sam (Max von Sydow), "the god of chance" who by a miracle survived the 20th century's most infamous atrocity and carries the reminder in a tattooed number on his arm. When Federico decides to take his leave of their partnership, Sam turns on him and, in the enigmatic act of an embrace, he deprives Federico of his "gift", the ability to absorb the luck of others.

The gift, as will be seen, is a kind of Masonic handshake among its initiates. "When you haven't got it, you're a nobody," says one of them. What makes its talismanic force so intriguing is the randomness of its allocation. Years after being expelled from Sam's employ, Federico gets wind of a catastrophic plane crash in which there was a single survivor, a young thief named Tomas (Leonardo Sbaraglia); instinctively recognising him as a fellow carrier of luck - the odds of being in a plane crash are a million to one, the odds of surviving one considerably higher - Federico adopts Tomas as his champion in an underworld of professional games-playing. This arcane syndicate of high-rollers bet with valuable commodities (a car, a painting) and they don't play with anything as humdrum as cards and dice. The first time Tomas sits down with them he has to risk his pinkie as a stake, for a game in which the bet is on whose head an insect will land. Later, the game involves running at full speed, blindfolded, with hands bound, through a dense forest, the winner being the last one not to run headlong into a tree. Its endgame is an extreme inversion of Russian roulette: five bullets, one empty chamber. Scary.

On the trail of this secret guild of gamblers is a policewoman, Sara (Monica Lopez), who bears a scar across her chest with its own story of luck. It was sustained in a car crash - the one which killed her husband and children. Her guilt is a microcosmic echo of Sam's: why should I survive when others died? Has fate singled us out, or is luck a resource that we draw from? This philosophical conundrum becomes no easier to unpick when the story of Tomas's girlfriend emerges. She was at the airport with him when Tomas told her he didn't love her any more; she never got on the plane, and so was spared its eventual doom. When Sara hears this, she relives the moments leading up to her car accident, with the twist that she averts the crash by recourse to the same words Tomas used: "I don't love you any more." Is that what it would have taken to save them?

The teasing gravity of Intacto, which leaks its meaning in ripples and echoes of association, recalls something of David Fincher's movies, notably the unsettling black farce of The Game and Fight Club. Fresnadillo creates the same kind of parallel world, where reality seems weirdly suspended but a dream logic still holds. There is also a slightly vampiric sensuality in the way the gift is drained from one body to another; the way that the preternaturally lucky character embraces an ordinary mortal carries a queasy undertone of violation. This is reflected in Xavier Jimenez's dark-toned cinematography; there is no more sinister shot in the movie than Max von Sydow stalking towards the camera down a blood-red corridor, like a Hammer horror shot by David Lynch.

Von Sydow's screentime is abbreviated - he appears at the beginning and end - but his performance is key to the film's emotional impact. Intacto is a slow burner, and some might be repelled either by its feyness or the obfuscations of its plotting. One is sometimes seized during a movie - Open Your Eyes, for example, and its dreadful remake Vanilla Sky - by the conviction that meaning has been sacrificed on the altar of style. Nobody behind the camera seems to care what's happening in front, so long as it looks good. The suspicion that this is one of those movies ebbs and flows until almost the very end, when Von Sydow, immaculate in his taupe suit, explains how he came to be the "luckiest man in the world"; in the course of his story, a wartime trauma, we learn why good luck has been the agent of his haunting. The actor's halting delivery, and the depth of sadness in those rheumy eyes, gather up the film's uneven movements into an elegy, echoed in the final shot of a man emerging from a scene of death into a desert landscape. From dust to dust: it feels exactly the right conclusion.

Max von Sydow interviewed, page 10