“Rich Flu” in the cinema – “Rich Flu”: Now the rich are drowning in the Mediterranean

Overtones are just spasms in the class struggle,” Franz-Josef Degenhardt once sang, albeit ironically, and in recent years cinema critical of capitalism has experienced a small renaissance in this spirit. It is depicted in films like Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness” or Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s “The Shaft,” a pandemic hit on Netflix. Gaztelu-Urrutia combined body horror and class metaphors and did so very robustly, without any nuances.

The director retained the flail as an aesthetic principle in “Rich Flu,” his first English-language film. The allegory is simple and, in this case, unfortunately a bit stupid. In “The Shaft” people were crammed into a multi-story tube, the food was passed from top to bottom on an elevator and looked correspondingly more disgusting the further down it went.

The obviously calculated, experimental nature of this experimental arrangement was good for the film, even if the script in the end didn’t know what to do with the architecture and allowed the previously hinted revolutionary impetus to fade away in a vaguely messianic ending.

“Rich Flu” is now told in a realistic mode, and always with a shaky camera, which is intended to ensure immediacy and realism. Unfortunately, this works comparatively poorly, simply because the basic idea does not carry any narrative weight and, in the context of political imagery, turns out to be even more one-dimensional than in “The Shaft”.

The rich are attacked by the disease of the title and die away, the richest first, then it goes down, staggered according to financial and capital volume: first the billionaires, then the multimillionaires and then so on. Societies are thrown into turmoil and the economy goes into overdrive as the infected panic and try to sell their assets, which now no one who wants to stay alive wants to have.

The apocalypse is told through Laura (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a careerist who has just made a steep rise in the film business, shortly before the epidemic breaks out that now affects her too. Together with her ex-husband (Rafe Spall) and their daughter (Dixie Egerickx), she flees the metropolis to the global south on a refugee boat.

The cuts are hectic, the sequences of images are scratchy. Almost every dialogue scene is dominated by unmotivated close-ups of the faces, which are supposed to mark something like a departure from common, but also narratively quite sensible Hollywood conventions, but in the end they just seem arrhythmic and staccato. “Rich Flu” looks like it was cut with hedge trimmers. The result is an anemic cinematic space.

In the case of the seemingly pre-cut dialogues, form and content correspond again. The idea of ​​making rich people a high-risk group in a pandemic is not in itself a bad one. However, “Rich Flu” spoils everything in the first quarter of the film with the characterization of the capital owners and their families. In this film, anyone who is rich is greedy and sociopathic or at least, like the protagonist Laura, emotionally cold and incapable of empathy and compassion. “Wealth” – there is no mention of capital in this film – accumulation and financial assets are once again transfigured into a question of character and so inevitably remain misunderstood.

It still could have been a nice cinematic dystopia. Unfortunately, “Rich Flu” also falls short in this respect. At the point at which Laura boards the refugee boat with her family and the images are reversed – now the rich are drowning in the Mediterranean – trying to construct something like a lustful revenge fantasy, the plot frays.

With the cinematic means that it used, “The Shaft” easily carried you past any lengths and, above all, its schematism. The rooms had depth, the body horror was staged effectively and aggressively. “Rich Flu”, on the other hand, doesn’t know what to do with the camera, plot and characters, both cinematically and in terms of his idea. However, “Rich Flu” is not unique. This film shares the inability or unwillingness to think in terms of structures rather than schematic character traits with many texts that can be summarized under the label “shortened criticism of capitalism”.

«Rich Flu», Spanien 2024. Regie: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, Buch: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, Pedro Rivero, David Desola, Sam Steiner. Mit: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Rafe Spall, Lorraine Bracco, Dixie Egerickx, Timothy Spall, Jonah Hauer-King. 116 min. Kinostart: December 12.