“…many real world situations that are “serious” have a sort of absurdist comedy thing going for them, and Wild Tales captures that perfectly.”

Yesterday I watched the film Wild Tales which I had been wanting to see since it got a limited release in theatres back in late 2014/early 2015. After I missed its theatre run, it kind of escaped my mind until I discovered that it was on Netflix streaming. I quickly sat down to watch it and it was well worth it. Wild tales is an interesting movie being that it doesn’t contain a single narrative throughout its entirety, it is more a collection of short films involving despicable people. With that in mind, it is kind of difficult to review this movie so forgive me if this review is short.

One thing I absolutely loved about Wild Tales was the comedy aspect. I am a huge fan of dark humour, and Wild tales just hits it out of the park with the absurdly dark situations characters find themselves in, as well as the comedic ways they solve their problems. All of the parts of the movie are beautifully shot and acted, which is something that usually gets overlooked in comedy films. These stories that were presented felt real, and that is why I like dark comedy so much. With regular comedy, it is difficult to find situations in real life that mirror what you would find in the average sitcom, but you will notice that many real world situations that are “serious” have a sort of absurdist comedy thing going for them, and Wild Tales captures that perfectly. There were a total of 6 stories presented in the film and I liked them all. That is not to say that none of them had problems, I found that the fourth and fifth stories presented were a lot slower than the others taking a while to get to the “punchline” (for lack of a better term). This makes sense in the fourth story because there is a lot of build up that needs to be covered, but the fifth story doesn’t really have that to fall back on. I feel the fifth story borders on cheap drama, and though the ending got a chuckle out of me it seemed that the build up was too much for the little pay off we got.

Really I don’t know what else to say about this movie. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and I would recommend it to anyone especially if they like dark comedies.

I give Wild Tales a B