‘Death Has No Master’ Cannes Review: Asia Argento Commands This Brooding But Slow-Burning Postcolonial Western

A curious blend of social drama, horror, and violent western, Death Has No Master sidesteps many of the clichés that typically define Latin American festival cinema, situating itself closer to the wave of auteur genre films that have emerged in recent years. Still, Venezuelan director Thielen Armand seems most at home with an older creative north: the European cinema of the 1960s and ’70s — Italian giallo, spaghetti westerns — and the film wears those influences openly.

The casting of Asia Argento in the lead role only reinforces that reading. The actress is not only the daughter of maestro Dario Argento but has built a long career in exactly this kind of film, where social and psychological drama press against genre frameworks that tend toward the dark and the unsettling. That is precisely what happens here. Argento plays Caro, a woman who travels to a remote Venezuelan village to sell the sprawling family estate left behind after her father’s death — never imagining that the transaction will be anything but straightforward.

The film reads as a story of colonial collision, with echoes of Claire Denis — particularly her work set in Africa and Latin America. From the moment Caro arrives in this town lost in time and abandoned to its fate, the obstacles multiply: a cop shaking her down for a bribe, an unsettling driver, and then, at the house itself, a far more complicated situation waiting for her.

The enormous, dilapidated property is already occupied. Its most prominent resident is Sonia (Dogreika Tovar), a Black woman and daughter of the family’s former housekeeper, along with Sonia’s son Maiko (Yermain Sequera) and a cluster of others who live in, pass through, or sublet corners of the place. In a country ravaged by poverty, Caro’s family home has become something like a refuge for the desperate.

But Caro wants her house and her money. What follows is a battle waged first through legal arguments and aggressive confrontations over property rights — a terrain made slippery by laws that complicate ownership when properties have been abandoned. When the legal angle proves futile, however, the conflict reverts to older rules: the law of the strongest, the best-connected, the most cunning.

Dense and atmospheric, with a heavily layered soundtrack pushing a narrative that moves at a deliberately sluggish pace, Death Has No Master is a suffocating study of two worlds in collision — a postcolonial reckoning in which the ownership of land is contested by any means necessary. Sonia and her people have their own ways of asserting their claim to the place; the disoriented Caro, for her part, will eventually pull her own strings to fight back.

The film is weighty, a touch pompous, steeped in its own solemnity — and that self-seriousness only begins to crack, mercifully, once the blood starts flowing. The knife-sharp dialogue and smoldering glances that have been building since the opening finally give way to the brutal violence that was always coming, and suddenly the Sam Peckinpah western hiding inside the film emerges — there’s a clear Straw Dogs influence hovering over the whole thing. It’s here, belatedly, that the film finds something resembling life. Or death, which by that point amounts to very much the same thing.