You can tell that the Pablo Larrain’s Ema was scripted off the cuff, day to day. This has prompted people to aim much more praise at the dance drama’s visually mesmerising quality than at the busy, restless narrative. The hallucinogenic frames are what immediately strike one in the Chilean filmmaker’s new experiment but more crucial are the jagged beats of reggaeton, which he deploys to tell this contemporary story about his country.
Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo), a young dancer by day and arsonist by night, is in an erratic marriage with a choreographer, Gastón (Gael García Bernal), her senior by at
