The Muzzled Horse of an Engineer in Search of Mechanical Saddles

After losing his job, a man starts walking aimlessly through Manila. Pushed on by existential fears, he feels magically drawn to horses, to the point that his obsessive fixation finally leads him to lose complete control over himself. “This is not a film by Khavn.” The opening credits mark the point of departure for this silent film. Without compromise the director makes it clear from the beginning that he refuses clearly defined conventions. He even acts subversively and anarchistically toward his own product. The Muzzled Horse of an Engineer in Search of Mechanical Saddles, peppered with horse symbols and underscored with electronic punk music, is conceivable as a surreal film, full of contradictions and ambivalences. Over four narrative sections, the film dives into the deep psychic levels of its main character and turns them inside out. With raw energy it hurls obsessions of sex and violence at the spectator, supported by images full of force. Subtitles that reproduce pornographic streams of thought expose the protagonist’s escalating constraints. Idiosyncratic and fascinating, the director presents a demoralized individual on the run who, driven on by both masculinity and monstrosity, wants to flee culture and society. Yet at the end of his odyssey he still remains their prisoner.
Ansgar Vogt