Quien a hierro mata: Where general gerontology and cultural gerontology meet

Image credit: “A Eye for an Eye”, directed by Paco Plaza, produced by Vaca Films, 2019.

Written by: Luis Freijo

In a small town of Galicia, in the Northwest of Spain, Mario (Luis Tosar) is the chief nurse of a retirement home who is about to become a father. His life changes, however, when Antonio Padín (Xan Cejudo), the head of a drug trafficking clan that has been operating off the Galician coast for decades, enters the retirement home to spend his last days, suffering a degenerative disease that affects his mobility but not his cognition. Mario has reasons from his past to want revenge on Antonio, and so a power play between the two characters, the nurse and his patient, ensues. This is the starting point of Paco Plaza’s Quien a hierro mata (An Eye for an Eye, 2019), a thriller that does not only feature the thematic and narrative conventions of the genre through the very present reality of a resident’s situation in a retirement home, but that sets up an interesting dialogue between cultural gerontology and general gerontology that is crucial to consider from the perspective of the AGE-C project.

According to Ricca Edmondson in Old Age in Europe, cultural gerontology “focuses on norms, values, practices, and moral ideas related to older age”, which can “shape significant images of older people in a society” (2013: 113). In other words, cultural gerontology results from the specific attention that social sciences and humanities give to older age and to representations of older age in media such as film. This is a crucial field for a film-based project like AGE-C to engage with, since a significant part of Film Studies consists of pairing filmmaking with theories in the social sciences or the humanities. Quien a hierro mata provides an excellent example of the fruitfulness of the approach. Once Antonio is admitted to the retirement home, he enters a disciplinary regime in a Foucauldian sense ruled by externally imposed norms and routines, which becomes all the more terrifying because of Mario’s vindictiveness. The conflict between nurse and patient has to do with the conventions of the thriller genre, of course, but it also speaks of the ongoing tensions between an older generation that becomes dependent of such external regimes and a younger generation that may or may not experience the responsibility of caring as a burden. The film also establishes an intergenerational conflict and its traumatic consequences when the past decisions of Antonio determine the course of Mario’s life, or when Antonio refuses to bail out his sons with his accumulated wealth after a deal with a rival gang goes wrong. All of these struggles and tensions can be ascertained through the combination of film aesthetics and a cultural gerontology approach, and indeed it is the aim of AGE-C to do so.

However, a perhaps less natural approach from a Film Studies perspective could entail engaging with general gerontology from other fields, such as the medical one. The aesthetic choices of Quien a hierro mata evidence that neglecting these fields would be an unfortunate choice. The film not only drives its narrative through the conflicts explained above, but also focuses on the routine practised by Antonio and Mario in the retirement home and the exercises that Antonio must work on in order to delay the process of deterioration as much as possible. Paco Plaza’s camera dwells on close ups of Antonio’s hands as he exercises them with Mario, on the techniques that the nurse teaches him to be able to eat on his own, on the different machinery that is available to the staff to facilitate their work with the more dependent residents. These medical conditions are of importance not only to carry on with the plot of the confrontation between Mario and Antonio, but also to configure the themes and ideas around old age that the film introduces.

It is therefore one of the challenges of AGE-C to be able to bring a balance between cultural gerontology and general gerontology when dealing with cinema and ageing. An all-encompassing approach when analysing a corpus of European cinema as a whole, or individual films such as Quien a hierro mata, will enhance the project’s study of how cinema reflects the ageing of the population and how the different players that construct a film navigate the issue of old age.

Related films:

Eye for an Eye is a 2019 spanish crime drama directed by Paco Plaza and starring Luis Tosar, Xan Cejudo and Ismael Martínez. 

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