How strict do you have to be as a parent? What is considered spoiling a child? And how do you define love?
These are the questions posed in the Chilean film The Punishment (El Castigo) directed by Matias Bize. When Ana and Mateo drive through a forest, the tension is palpable. Ana wants to keep driving, but her husband insists on turning around. We realize that they intentionally left their seven-year-old son stranded after he misbehaved, to teach him a lesson, as the mother keeps repeating. When they return to the spot where they left him, all they find is a hat. The child has disappeared.
What ensues are layers of truth that do not stop at arguments over how to raise their son, but uncover the dysfunction of their marriage, the mother’s sacrifice and the father’s ignorance of her needs. Ana does not come across as likable until she spills her deepest feelings, and Mateo is not the loving hero he would like everyone to believe he is.
The Punishment was filmed in one single long shot which heightens the suspense of this psychological thriller. Bize made his first short film when he was still in school with a similar style. He said in an interview at the Estonian Film Festival where the film was in competition, “I was looking for 20 years to find a story that I could shoot in one sequence. But I did not want to show off the technical thing, how I could shoot it. I wanted to focus on the story. A lot of people who know about the shooting it in one take go to see it [because of that], but after ten minutes, they forget about the technical thing, and they enter the story.”
The lead actors Antonia Zegers and Nestor Castillana are well-known in Chile. The young director, Bize, has made a name for himself with La Memoria del Agua and En La Cama.