Filmmaker Guerrilla Metropolitana’s claustrophobic mind-fuck, The Benefactress carries the subtitle, “an exposure of cinematic freedom.” A more perfect description, I have yet to witness.

As with his debut film, 2023’s, Dariuss, The Benefactress seeks to destroy the boundaries of filmmaking and invite the audience to participate in a cinematic rebellion. Guerrilla Metropolitana doesn’t film depravity for the sake of shocks and his work is far from the repulsive (and near criminal) abominations made by a man like Lucifer Valentine and others of his ilk. Metropolitana certainly has his own vision; one that is unmistakably dark. Graphic depictions of sexuality and mental mayhem fill the screen, but there is a reason for the director’s filmmaking rhyme. The style is uncompromising and the imagery will be disturbing, but for those mistaking his works as pointless exploitation, look closer. 

Metropolitana received funding from the wife of an American evangelical pastor. The director’s only caveat was that she appeared in the picture. Appearing through a livestream while naked and wearing a mask to conceal her identity and going by the name Elektra McBride, the pastor’s wife does just that. The voyeur wife of an evangelical watches the depravity, getting off to sights of a world she has (we assume) yet to experience.

Through this revelation, Metropolitana is speaking a brutal truth. The director is driving a stake through the heart of the hypocrisy from those who condemn an individual’s right to sexual freedom.

Forever and a day, Right Wing evangelicals have protested sex workers, pornography, and the very act of sex for pleasure. So-called Christians want everyone to see sex as something filthy and any proclivities that go beyond what is perceived as the “biblical norm” are met with hellfire damnation. As history continues to teach us, those who claim to live with the purity of God always fall the hardest. The news is littered with stories of preachers and politicians who speak against the LGBTQ communities with a repulsive bigotry, claiming anything sexual beyond a man and woman is pure sin and that being gay or transgender leads to pedophilia. The messaging is always that God will strike down homosexuals and send them to Hell. It is never too long before their hypocrisies are exposed and the news shifts to stories of these men (they are almost always men) getting caught doing the very “sins” they preach against.

The bible-thumpers are the most deviant and Metropolitana is fed up with their sanctimonious deceit cloaked in scripture. He knows what these people do in the dark, when removed from their pulpits of hate. A large part of this film’s message is precisely as Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much…”

In The Benefactress, Juicy X (playing “herself”) begins the film by addressing the audience, speaking to her previous work with the director. She describes the extremes of their first collaboration followed by a bit about her actual life. In telling of her respected work within her community, we understand that she is a “regular gal” with a vanilla life who agreed to willfully participate in the type of art Metropolitana likes to make. This introduction shows the dichotomies of the person and the performer. One can be a good soul yet still have the desire to explore something dangerous within them. It is those who suppress their needs that become unstable and act out in unhealthy ways. Metropolitana’s film finds its characters going over the darker edge, as Juicy X fuels her fantasies of depravity by acting them out to the extreme. What she is to other people in her vanilla life isn’t a facade. The character and the actress has found her sexual freedom and has walked through the film’s open-door invitation to rebellious exploration.

Juicy X has a woman in her home (played by an actress known only as “Mystery Woman”) who seems to be a willing captive. She proceeds to sexually violate the woman, as the mysterious masked benefactress watches through the livestream. Eventually, the film’s director (Metropolitana) participates in the sexual domination of the woman. 

The Benefactress is not a film where the sex is meant to arouse. The aura created by the director is too unnerving. Like David Cronenberg‘s divisive 1997 masterpiece, Crash, this film almost dares the viewer to become aroused. At the same time, keeping with Metropolitana’s message, he would never shame anyone who found some of it enticing. Not necessarily the brutality of what is being depicted, but the freedom of it all.  

There is a fascinating Cinéma vérité design to this and the director’s other works. Metropolitana takes his extremes to artful levels of provocation that allow the larger themes of voyeuristic culpability and moral ambiguity to bleed into the imagery. The lines between the fictional and the true are blurred. Where does the fantastical end and reality begin? For Metropolitana and the performers in his work, the questions go purposefully unanswered.

Is The Benefactress a horror film? No, but if there is horror to be found, it is comparable to Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left; a film that achieves an uncomfortable intensity through in-your-face brutalization and perversity, but with a certain style. The same is true for this picture. Metropolitana injects something perverse into his creation, but the sexual brutality is important to the story, the film’s messages, and to the director’s rebellious spirit. 

The characters who populate the films of Guerilla Metropolitana (and the worlds in which they exist) are the very essence of Jim Morrison’s lyric, “No one here gets out alive.” Humanity has doomed themselves and the director is here to capture it, but the filmmaker is not nihilistic. His works are deeper than one might allow themselves to realize and whether or not a viewer vibes with his style is almost irrelevant in the scheme of the director’s vision.

Guerilla Metropolitana doesn’t care for conventional cinematic techniques when creating his art. The acceptance of bold and untethered experimentation is key to understanding his vision. Those who don’t turn away will experience something complex and challenging.

The Benefactress (an Exposure of Cinematic Freedom) is a picture that lives on the fringes of modern filmmaking, but stands as a boldly adventurous work that will cause praise and debate in equal measure.

Adventurous audiences should have no fear. To quote Hunter S. Thompson, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

 

The Benefactress
Written & Directed by Guerilla Metropolitana
Starring Juicy X, Elektra McBride, Mystery Woman, marie Antoinette de Robespierre, Guerilla Metropolitana
NR, 67 Minutes, Blood Pact Films