Experimental, post-modern giallo where the narrative (a girl, Ana, is haunted by the death of her grandfather and the sight of her parents having sex, grows up and then returns to the house of her childhood) advances through the interplay of sensation, memory and imagination. As such although the giallo influence is clear (vivid colour scheme, crash zooms, the intertwining of sex and death, etc), the film is probably more indebted to Lynch and Svankmajer. AMER is obsessed with amplifying the details of sense - a comb running along skin, an ant crawling over a stomach, water slowly consuming a body in a bath - and the film progresses from detail to detail, in the style of montage, until a detail unlocks a memory / illusion (Cattet and Forzani think it unimportant to distinguish between the two).
This approach is initially beguiling but in their obsession with minutiae they forget the overall picture. Where something like LOST HIGHWAY, an even less comprehensible picture similarly about a devastating battle between reality and imagination, is driven in a narrative sense (who killed his wife, where has he disappeared to, can he return?) AMER just assumes you will want to see the next image without obviously setting it in place of a strong, over-arching narrative. Admittedly AMER is gorgeous but it fights so hard to be enigmatic and free floating that it drifts ever increasingly away from the viewer in a sea of erotic symbolism. Highly frustrating: Cattet and Forzani are a good, clear script away from something really special.
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