El crimen perfecto
With Guillermo Toledo, Monica Cervera, Luis Varela, Fernando Tejero, Kira Miro, and Enrique Villeri
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Like any good maker of black comedy, Iglesia measures his humor in deviations from the norm. His debut feature, Mutant Action (1993), was a grungy sci-fi adventure about a group of deformed gonzos who carry out terrorist missions against beautiful celebrities and the culture of personal attractiveness. In his much-loved The Day of the Beast (1995), a trio of oddballs–a Basque priest, a slick TV mystic, and a thuggish black-metal fan–team up to hunt down and kill the Antichrist. And his wonderful Hitchcock homage Common Wealth (2000), a Rear Window-type story about a real estate agent who finds a pile of money in a dead man’s apartment, features a rogues’ gallery of neighbors that includes a balding geek who lives with his mother and dresses up as Darth Vader.
Yet Rafael fails to recognize his most ardent follower, a homely young woman named Lourdes (presumably to evoke the sick and disabled pilgrims to the French cathedral). Played by Monica Cervera, she’s a real fright, with bug eyes, frizzy black hair, and a smile so fierce she actually looks better scowling; first seen descending on a store escalator as Rafael ascends on the adjoining one, she turns away in shame. Rafael is uniformly smug and cruel toward those less attractive than he is, but he gets a monumental comeuppance when Lourdes witnesses the death of Antonio, steals the body from the store basement (where Rafael has been trying to stuff it into a furnace), and blackmails the department store princeling into becoming her boyfriend.
