A bizarre yet compelling look at luck

By Kenneth Turan
Los Angeles Times

•	'Intacto' R (for strong language, violence and nudity) 108 minutes

What if luck was something quantifiable, a commodity that could be traded, gambled away, even stolen. What if luck were a gift that could be discovered and maximized or, just as easily, deactivated. What if good luck for you meant bad luck for someone else. Even scarier, what if other people could bet with your luck without your knowledge, risking the entire course of your life in the process.

The wonderfully spooky Spanish film "Intacto" takes these questions and concepts and turns them into a sharp brainteaser of a film, a compelling mind game you compulsively play along with. Think of "The Hustler" in a "Twilight Zone" setting and you'll have an idea of the territory director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo and his co-writer Andrés M. Koppel are getting into.

Fresnadillo, who won the Goya, his country's Oscar, for best new director with this, his debut, is one of a group of Spanish filmmakers who have a gift for contemporary fantasy, for making supernatural thrillers of the everyday that posit that the world is stranger than we can possibly know, that odd forces are at play and just out of reach of our understanding.

The director was helped in this by a well-chosen cast and a cinematographer (Xavier Giménez) able to craft a clean, matter-of-fact style that is the ideal counterpoint to the strange dramatic situation.

The emotional center of "Intacto" is Samuel Berg (persuasively played by Max von Sydow), otherwise known as the king of luck or the god of chance. He's a concentration-camp survivor who lives in the antiseptic bunker of a gambling casino on a blasted lava field (shot in the director's Canary Islands homeland) and no one has ever had more control over luck. Even Berg's top lieutenant and protégé Federico (Eusebio Poncela), who lived through a destructive earthquake, discovers he cannot leave the man and take his good fortune with him.

Banished from the kingdom, Federico devotes himself to finding a protégé of his own, someone he can match against the king. He thinks he's found him when he comes across Tomas (Leonardo Sbaraglia), the only person to come out intact (hence the film's title) after a plane crash that killed 237 others.

Federico introduces Tomas to the bizarre world of clandestine gambling based on luck, a disturbing subculture that involves peculiar contests of chance like running blindfolded but full speed through a forest heavy with trees. It's an undeniably creepy world, but as presented here a completely convincing one.

Federico's quest is complicated because Tomas turns out to be a fugitive bank robber actively pursued by the law. Causing more difficulties is that Sara (Mónica López), the policewoman chasing Tomas, is another one of these preternaturally fortunate individuals with luck to burn.

Because it is so smart and so carefully worked out, "Intacto" can be a bit hard to follow at times, but the effort it takes to understand what's happening is well worth it.