Neto Villalobos’ Tropical Dystopia Thriller ‘Love Is the Monster,’ With ‘Gloria’ Star Paulina García, Boarded by Mexico’s Liminal Estudio (EXCLUSIVE)

Headed by Paulina García, the Berlin Silver Bear actress award winner for “Gloria” from Oscar-winner Sebastián Lelio, “Love Is the Monster” figures as a potential highlight at the IFF Panama’s Primera Mirada, a pix-in-post showcase, which unspools over April 10-11.

“Neto’s bold vision in ‘Love Is the Monster’ made joining the project a priority for us. Creating science fiction from within Latin America allows us to project our real anxieties and reclaim our future from collective imaginations imposed by the Global North. Genre filmmaking in the region is an act of subversion and few films bite as hard as this one,” said Liminal Estudio’s Sumie García and Carlos Paz.

With Liminal Estudio on board, it now rates as a multilateral co-production which often marks out the strongest of movies from Latin America. Think Joaquín del Paso’s “The Garden We Dreamed,” hailed by Variety as a standout at this year’s Berlinale Panorama and backed by eight companies. “Love Is the Monster” is now produced by Panama’s Expansiva Cine, Costa Rica’s La Sucia Centroamericana, Cine Infinito in Peru, Clara Films based out of Chile and Mexico’s Liminal.

In “Love Is the Monster,” García stars as a grandmother, 70, who is told by doctors that she has not much time to live. She seeks to get closer to her granddaughter, 7, despite confrontational relations with her own daughter, who cuts off contact.

After earning back her daughter’s trust, the granddaughter, however, is kidnapped while in her care. As the grandmother searches for her, she proves that, despite the stigma of old age, she will do whatever it takes for her family.

Taken from the film’s early going, a nine-minute clip shown at Darkroom Rotterdam, the IFFR work-in-progress program, tracks García’s character with her grand-daughter at her own wealthy chalet home, as they bond sketching figures on the inner wall of an empty swimming pool. The grandmother also locks a maid in a bathroom, presumably to spend more time with the daughter, whom she gives a baby rabbit.

Later, grandmother and granddaughter drive down a road of African palm trees, passing a lorry load of immigrants, monotonous electricity grid lines crossing the sky and workers fumigating trees, Villalobos accumulating details of a harsh contemporary world.

At one moment, the grandmother’s car knocks down an animal, maybe a goat, leaving it mortally wounded. Turning up the music in get car so that her daughter won’t hear, the grandmother gets out the car, takes a revolver out of her bag, and wincing and turning away, shoots the animal in the head.

“‘Love is the Monster’is a dystopian thriller with an all-female cast, exploring love and despair in an increasingly hostile world. Blending genre with realism, it reflects an unsettling reality that feels dangerously close,” Villalobos told Variety. “In my third feature, I pursue a slow-burning, visceral approach to explore the moral dilemma of a grandmother willing to do whatever it takes to protect her granddaughter, regardless of the consequences.”

Villalobos has commented in the past to Variety that he wanted “to explore how far a grandmother can go for love, in a world where tenderness and violence coexist under the same skin.”

Talent as a Co-Production Driver