The Welder – Review
86 Minutes, Not Rated
Written by Manuel Degadillo and David Liz
Directed by David Liz
**NOTE: this post may be updated with audio if we actually decide to talk about it. Until then, you can read Mark’s review below. Remember, though, you can listen to all our discussions of this and every other movie directly over on ACAST. Stay tuned.**
Synopsis:
Roe and Eliza, a young couple on a weekend getaway, come face-to-face with the harrowing experiments of a former doctor bent on curing the social blight of racism.
Eliza, a young Latina woman is haunted by a traumatic event she experienced while in the military, so her African American boyfriend takes her on a ranch to help relieve her anxiety and panic attacks. But once there, they find themselves in a fight for their lives as they attempt to elude the demented racial experiments of a doctor gone mad.
This is a terribly easy review to write:
The Welder is terrible from start to finish.
The script is overly simplistic. While the goal of the antagonist might be understandable–even desireable–the implementation fails on both narrative and reality-based fronts.
The idea that somehow “welding” (and we’ll get to that in a minute) differing races together in a single person will magically remove any racist sentiments is laughable at best, and a complete ignorance of human nature at worst. Racists today are given blood transfusions, bone marrow transfusions, corneal transplants, etc., from different races, yet racism persists. Look deep enough into anyone’s genealogy and you’ll find a racial deviance from the racists’ perceived “norm,” yet this fact does not cure racism.
Therefore, the central conceit of The Welder is dispelled out of hand, and we haven’t even gotten to the idea that–even allowing the ridiculous idea above was remotely possible–the methodology ruins this film on a narrative level.
Welding.
Yeah, instead of a solid medical idea like traditional surgical transplantation, The Welder literally gives us shots of the antagonist using a propane torch–like a plumber would use to solder copper pipes–ON HUMAN FLESH, and–AND!–throwing sparks like an angle grinder on steel.
I kid you not.
Add in the barely passable performances and line delivery, along with the all-too-cringe-inducing trauma previously suffered by our heroine (which there was no need for in the grand scheme of things, but I guess women need a trauma… or something) and the entire-too-predictable denouement, and The Welder finds itself desperately in need of a script transplant.
After it burns the original with that propane torch.
Worst part of The Welder, though? The first time I tried to watch it the stream kept locking up at the 6-minute mark, so I had to COME BACK LATER to actually watch the whole thing.
Ugh.
The Welder releases digitally on February 24, 2023, and stars Camila Rodriguez, Vincent De Paul, Roe Dunkley, Crist Moward, Anthony Vazquez, and Jorge Pico.
And remember, if the BEST thing you can say about a movie is that it’s “visually stunning,” then they’ve done something wrong.
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