Osama Chami and Enrique Gimeno | Según Mateo (According to Mateo) / 2017

swallowing abuse

by Douglas Messerli

 

Osama Chami and Enrique Gimeno (screenwriters and directors) Según Mateo (According to Mateo) / 2017 [20 minutes]

 

Spanish writers and directors Osama Chami Enrique Gimeno, in least in their films, are fascinated with the dark corners of sex. Their later 2021 film, Young Diego, concerns implied and willful cannibalism. And the central character of this earlier work, According to Mateo, is clearly into pain and S&M.

     Mateo (Enrique Gimeno) and his lover Marc (Michaël Assié) return home from a club with a young man they have picked up, Luke (Joe Busk).

     At their apartment, Luke immediately spots a broken mirror on the floor, the pieces of which Mateo picks up, now hanging the frame by using a large butcher knife, it’s blade pointed towards him, as a hammer for the nail.

     The well-dressed Marc checks their drug trove, discovering that they are out, and calls his drug dealer Jon (Manuel Castillo Huber) for an immediate new delivery.

     But meanwhile, it appears, Mateo has been cut, both in his forehead, and more severely in his hand, which is bleeding. We can’t perceive whether the cuts had to do with the broken mirror and the knife, but Marc insists upon wrapping his hand in gauze while Luke holds it, the act leading to a kiss, and before it has even begun a threesome as Marc removes Luke’s and Mateo’s shirt, and then his own, the three moving off into the bed.

     Yet as soon as the three begin to have sex, Marc screams out that Mateo has bitten him, Mateo immediately jumping up and moving out of the room. A minute later we can already hear the sounds of lovemaking between Marc and Luke, as Mateo dresses and leaves the house.

      Downstairs, he discovers the drug dealer, ready to deliver, Mateo arguing that there’s no longer anyone upstairs and that he will pay for it. But Jon is skeptical and wants to deliver it himself, Mateo insisting that he take him anywhere, Jon finally relenting and taking him to his own home on his motor bike.

      There, Mateo discovers Jon’s collected of pinned and framed insects, that the man is a kind of self-taught entomologist, all of which might remind any regular movie-goer a bit of Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho, a man interested in animal taxidermy.

     Some of the pieces are purchased, Jon explains, but most of them were created my him. Jon poisons insects using ether on those who don’t fly and potassium cyanide on the flying ones, since they are so delicate. But you have to handle the latter carefully he observes. It you are around too long you can faint. Mateo is curious what will happen if you just smell it, Jon suggesting you just get sick.

      This leads Mateo to open up the bottle and take a sniff, moving over the sit on the couch. Jon, clearly worried about his guest’s state of mind, tells him to leave. But when Mateo makes to effort to move, commands him to stand. He moves over to him and drops his pants as Mateo, almost greedily, gives him a blow job.

      Finished, he commands Mateo to swallow it and leave.

     Once again, however, Mateo remains, even as Jon turns his back to him in returning to his killing, positioning, and framing of insects. When Jon turns back into the room, Mateo lays on the floor seemingly in preparation for the S&M like threats, scissors in hand, that Jon makes as he runs the flat blade of the small scissors down his chest. Finally, Mateo stops him when his hand and metal slips over his right gut, Mateo insisting it is the correct spot.

      Jon takes up the small scissors and stabs its point deeply into Mateo, the handsome young man now bleeding in several spots somewhat like a wounded Christ. When Jon is finished, helps Mateo  to put on his shirt and again turns away, clearly disgusted with the violence Mateo has invoked.

      Mateo stumbles out and walks back home, crawling into bed with Marc, now alone. Mateo calls out “Marc…”, the other answering “What?” The film goes dark with Mateo answering, “Nothing.”

     Theirs is clearly a relationship of nothings, centered it appears in an utter lack of communication. In the film’s introductory statement, Chami observes that Mateo “can’t feel anything if it’s not through pain,” but we are shown that, never told. Mateo and Jon, in their dance of death say very little and don’t bother to explain why their have taken up the roles of torturer and victim. It is clearly their natural roles in life.

      It is also rather apparent that Mateo’s desire for feeling has much to do with his lover Marc, who seems disinterested in his own companion, clearly on the lookout for new sexual thrills that young boys like Luke provide.

      Many an observer has been disgusted by the violent actions depicted in this work, but they are far less violent than most Hollywood action films and this film is certainly not near as graphic as many a commercial horror film. There is a kind of elegance, contrarily, in Chami and Gimeno’s images, a fin de siècle approach to eroticism and a moral justification for Mateo’s bloodletting as evidence of Marc’s obvious disdain of his bedmate. Writing in Gay Celluloid, Dave Hall summarizes the film as being “a work that makes for uncomfortable and at times painful viewing, as the narrative focuses on issues that culminate in the hurt one man feels; both emotionally and physically.”

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).