Tiro en la Cabeza Jaime Rosales

Minimalist approaches to cinema tend to divide audiences - but few films are so extreme in their restraint that their style is mistaken for a technical malfunction. I’ve heard of two cases in which screenings of Tiro en la Cabeza (Bullet in the Head) were cancelled because the projectionist was convinced the film’s soundtrack was incomplete; how else could one explain conversations that lasted for minutes while all we hear is background street noise?

In fact, this is the film’s central conceit: in depicting the everyday life of a man leading up to a violent shooting, the camera adopts the implied perspective of a hidden surveillance team. We observe his behaviour on long lenses from a distance, across busy streets or through the windows of his home - but all we hear is the sound at the camera’s location, not the characters’.

When the minimalist approach works it’s because, by denying us such comforts, our vision is expanded in other ways. Tiro succeeds on this level to an extent, with the absence of context and dialogue forcing us to scour every phrase and nuance of behaviour for clues; as a result, we pay more attention to what we are given. But considering the film’s inspiration - although nowhere alluded to, the film is actually based on a real shooting involving Basque separatists and Spanish police - these seem like small dividends in a film that is curiously cut off from the larger issues it skirts around.

Donal Foreman