Fauna (Nicolás Pereda, 2020) (Patreon)

Pereda, now on this ninth feature, seems like a director who should have made the leap to Main Slate status by this point. This year, in particular, Pereda is joined in NYFF by two filmmakers whose work his superficially resembles -- Tsai Ming-liang and Mathías Piñeiro. Like those two, Pereda has made a series of features that are almost modular recombinants of one another, with a recurring cast of regulars whose very presence has become a kind of directorial signature. 

And yet, there is something almost defiantly minor about many of Pereda's films, as though he were less interested in them on their own terms than as part of an ongoing conceptual style. One of three Currents selections that, as a troika, represented this year's Wavelengths section at Toronto, Fauna is a film that seems somehow incomplete, or at least left me wanting more. It begins promisingly in one mode -- a bone-dry riff on Meet the Parents, as Paco (Francisco Barreiro) keeps innocently running afoul of the expectations of his girlfriend's father (José Rodríguez López) and brother (Gabino Rodríguez). 

But then, based on a dream the brother has, Fauna moves into meta-narrative mode, becoming a low-key story of mistaken identity, hunting for fugitives, and an unexpected barging in to someone else's motel room. Pereda intends to generate humor through the discrepancy between the high-intensity acting (the TV show Narcos, on which Barreiro is a cast member, is repeatedly referenced) and the ultra-cheap setting. But the relationship between the two halves seems rather random. There is a throughline of absurdity -- based on human behavior in the first half, and plot mechanics in the second. But this only suggests an unresolved dialectic. This is the sort of terrain that Alain Guiraudie manages with much more success.