Found this on Netflix last night. It's a Mexican remake of a Spanish remake of an Italian film. There's a Korean version too. Only the Yanks seem to have passed and it is really not hard to see why.
The set up is that a group of fairly unlikeable upper middle-class Chilangos — three couples and a late-arriving fifth wheel — gather for a dinner party in Roma Norte during a lunar eclipse.
At some point in the early stages (the food barely gets a walk on part) the host suggests a game: everyone has to place their mobiles in the middle of the table and thereafter any 'incoming' (calls, texts, images) have to be shared with everyone present. With the exception of one relative newcomer, they've known each other for a long time. What could go wrong?
This is definitely one of those stories with a beginning, a middle and and end. The writing is not really good enough to make the serious, talky parts all that engaging, but these occur mostly during the slow build up.
The middle section is characterised by outright farce, with a a sudden onrush of homophobic comedy, which is fairly hilarious — well, down here at least, less so in liberal/affluent New York I'd wager — which is then offset in a somewhat insincere fashion later on via an awkwardly po-faced speech.
The phone swap which set this up had darker potential on the 'other side', which was never fully opened up. So in effect, one character (the aforementioned morally-didactic speech-maker) keeps his sordid secret intact, even if he has had to act out another's.
As I was fretting a bit about this, another character who had locked herself in the bog for a while, emerges and appears to have knowledge of a secret revealed in her absence. And at this point everything becomes a bit of a muddle as director Manolo Caro tries to pull off a spliced ending similar to J.B. Priestley's Dangerous Corner. I have no idea if this was inherited from the original(s), but as I was already scratching my head a bit at this point, the path of least resistance was to simply continue.
I mentioned that the circle of friends was disagreeable, an effect which I think might be amplified by this Mexican context, but the exception is plastic-surgeon Manolo, played by Bruno Bichir, an actor that I have always found agradable in whatever role he shows up in.
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