Flames ripple across the tide in a jagged rockpool near the shore of the lonesome, wind-whipped Chilean island that houses “La Perra“: a film often content to surrender to the elements, though rarely in quite such unexpected combination. As it turns out, there’s a rational explanation for this flammable water — years ago, a gas pipeline burst on that spot, making for something of a famed local curiosity — but it’s an aptly uncanny image in Chilean writer-director Dominga Sotomayor‘s arresting, intriguing new film. A portrait of independent womanhood in unforgiving surrounds, “La Perra” trades heavily in matters that resist easy explanation, from an unresolved mystery of disappearance in the protagonist’s past, to the unknowable mind of her wayward dog.
Recently premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival, Sotomayor’s first film since last year’s Netflix-backed “Swim to Me” drifts far from the comparatively broad commercial accessibility of that for-hire project, circling back toward the intimate, off-kilter sensibility of her highly personal breakout works “Thursday to Sunday” and “Too Late to Die Young.” This despite the fact that “La Perra” (which translates as “The Bitch,” though the film retains its Spanish title internationally) is, like “Swim to Me,” an adaptation, drawn from a well-regarded, widely translated novel of the same title by Colombian author Pilar Quintana.
