Bad Vibes

In Zama (2017), Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel creates a sensory-driven cinematic experience that explores the subjective and sociopolitical dimensions of colonialism. Set in the late eighteenth-century Spanish Empire, the film utilizes an intensely disquieting soundscape to facilitate what I term “auditory ruination.” This concept ties sound to the material and sensory remnants of systemic oppression, defamiliarizing colonial perception through a “sonic uncanny.” Distinct from the Freudian psychological uncanny, this affective mode draws on Mark Fisher’s conceptualization of the weird and the eerie—modes that refuse reconciliation with “the homely” (to use Freud’s term) to instead acknowledge the outside. By analyzing Martel’s acoustic strategies, I examine how the filmmaker generates bad vibes, or an affective tonality of ambient dread. Her strategies include a disorienting acousmatic voice (sound heard without a visible source), the anacousmêtre (the monstrous marriage of body and voice), rendering (the translation of tactile sensations into sound), diegetic sonic texture (the gritty, material qualities of the narrative world’s environment), and the Shepard tone (an auditory illusion of an infinitely rising pitch). Through this acoustic overload, the film systematically strips the colonial administrator of his psychological mastery, exposing the foundational paranoia of the imperial enterprise. In doing so, Zama moves beyond the purely representational to stage a sensory confrontation with the systemic violence of empire—offering a methodological model for a decolonial practice that refuses to be isolated from politics.