DEATH HAS NO MASTER

Deep within the intoxicating Venezuelan mountains, Caro, a disgruntled heiress to a lavish mansion buried within the jungle, returns to her decadent family estate. To her surprise, the former workers from her family’s establishment have since occupied the property, nurturing and maintaining its walls despite its abandoned proprietorship. Once home to a colonial cacao plantation, Caro begins to resist the pleas of her former family friends to remain on the property, turning against the same people who helped raise her at a young age. As the isolation and alienation of the humid jungle begin to alter Caro’s perception of reality, her desire for reclamation supersedes her moral compass. By any means necessary, the remorseless heir begins to resort to violence for the benefit of her blood-stained property. 

With Jorge Thielen Armand’s third feature, the accomplished Venezuelan auteur mixes elements from contemporary westerns, exploitation cinema, and horror to deliver one of the must-see cold-shower movies of the year. Death Has No Master is an accomplished stomach-churning genre picture — a dreadful descent into the neo-colonial psyche that drives the film's conflict into an inevitable bloody showdown. Death Has No Master is a ghost story that’s absent of the supernatural. The ghosts in Armand’s suspenseful film are the fleeting memories of a once prosperous estate; a reverberation of the past that instigates painful violence into the present. As Venezuela's official Oscar®-entry for the 2027 Academy Awards, Death Has No Master is a bold Canadian co-production that reminds us that human violence is intrinsically embedded in our land and its history. Only those who refuse to confront their past will inevitably repeat the same cycle.  - David Cuevas