Into the Abyss (Me encontrarás en lo profundo del abismo)

 Into the Abyss, or to use its original, more evocative title: You Will Find Me in the Depths of the Abyss, is an interesting no-budget Argentine science fiction/horror hybrid set in a post-alien invasion Buenos Aires where a few survivors scrabble around abandoned buildings under an eternal storm.

 Its best bit of world building comes near the beginning when we catch up with our protagonist, Bannon (Martín Rispau), locked in a car under the driving rain. He finds an almost-empty plastic water bottle, shakes it wistfully, and drinks the dregs desperately; We'll find out what's wrong with the rainwater soon enough, but it was beautifully set up by this small gesture. Bannon looks through some pictures of his wife and son on his phone, listens to her voicemails, and finally (we assume) hunger and thirst compel him to abandon the vehicle and go into a nearby building.

 The place is derelict and picked clean by looters, but he soon finds a dead body with a gun and a walkie talkie. Trying out a frequency he finds written on a wall, he manages to make contact with Demian (Germán Baudino), who keeps him company as a disembodied voice. Later Bannon has to escape from a humanoid alien and has a face-off with another survivor.
 There's a very heavy survival horror videogame vibe to all these elements - director Matías Xavier Rispau is a self-described gamer, and is currently working on a videogame set in the movie's universe. As a movie it works, just about: the pacing is glacial, and while there's enough atmosphere to enough to get by on that alone, it feels a little too familiar to anyone with passing familiarity with modern computer games.
 The script (by Rispau and Boris C.Q.) peppers Bannon's journey with incidents, some unexplained weirdness and a little action, but seems to get tired of the abandoned city more than halfway through and changes locale and feel to recontextualize everything we know about the protagonist. I can't say I didn't welcome the change - the survival horror first half was severely overstaying its welcome - and I like where it ends up leading, but it leaves the film feeling fractured, two separate pieces that don't really mesh well together.

 Flawed and a little boring, but interesting - and given that it was made for something like a grand and a half in US dollars, its shortcomings are easy to overlook. The visuals (cinematography by the director and Juan Facundo Lopez) often manage to look lovely, in a very bleak way, although the digital video doesn't play nice with the often very dark environments. The acting's fine - Martín Rispau makes for a believable slightly unhinged survivor, and Baudino is excellent as Demian.

 But it's the score by Martin Fuu that knocks it out of the park, often elevating the film with a wonderful synthwave score I am currently streaming in the background - it takes a while to get going, but once it does it's good enough to listen on its own. His soundtracks for Legiones and When Evil Lurks were excellent, but this one is something else.