Worth three-decade wait

Satantango

After a locust-ridden summer, and on the brink of torrential autumn rains, there is a sense of pause. Everything is clad in spider-web, and held fast, but the spiders themselves are rarely seen. The remaining locals have a little money from cattle sales and are theoretically planning their escape. But in this purgatory of lust, distrust, constant in-fighting and self-serving revisionism, routine is everything, and all they truly desire is a return to the way things used to be.

To people in need of salvation, the bells are a harbinger, announcing the imminent arrival of something either godly or, more likely, its antithesis: two men, the messianic Irimiás and his sidekick Petrina, both believed dead, have been sighted nearby. At night, the villagers gather in a local bar, to argue, discuss, drink, and shed their inhibitions through a distinctively demonic dance step, a kind of satanic tango. Irimiás, they want to believe, will change their lives and rescue their world from the abyss. But whispered rumours cling to him, suggesting he’d been an informer, in collusion with the powers that be, or a money-grabbing conman, or something immeasurably, unspeakably worse. One thing is clear: he has plans for them. And, when tragedy strikes, they are fodder for his feast.