Tommy Snöberg Söderberg 
Awakening the Best is a Brazilian horror/drama from 1970. An experiment is to be conducted in which four people, under the influence of LSD, will be confronted with Coffin Joe. Their hallucinations are individual and very specific to their own personalities. What they do have in common, however, is that they are all connected to sex in some way and that these experiences are presented in a relatively sleazy manner. Will Coffin Joe take possession of their souls, and how will the experiment turn out?
We follow a series of disconnected events that seem to symbolize society’s decadence and decline. The degenerate youth who live for sex, drugs, and rock and roll are an obvious example, but forms of sadomasochism are also clearly present. Rape and other perversions are depicted with extraordinary precision, although most of the time they remain outside the camera’s reach. I wouldn’t say this is a disadvantage, since it is often a much more effective way of affecting the viewer than showing everything at once.
Of course, this doesn’t prevent what we are confronted with from being highly psychedelic while at the same time enormously confusing. It isn’t always easy to tell what is actually happening in the movie. The little stories, which may be there to illustrate society’s decline, are chaotic, and the discussions between the doctor conducting the experiment and José Mojica Marins himself, playing himself, don’t exactly help explain how everything fits together. There seems to be quite a bit of confusion between them as well, and at one point Marins even claims that he has no idea what he’s doing there.
But all of that is really just a warm-up for the movie’s actual plot, namely the experiment. Four people are to be confronted with Coffin Joe while under the influence of LSD, although I have no idea what the expected outcome is supposed to be. Nor do I know what hypothesis the experiment is intended to prove. What I do know, however, is that as the movie builds toward the experiment, it shows snippets from the earlier Coffin Joe movies, and once the hallucinations finally get underway, things become even stranger, if that’s possible.
The hallucinations of the four individuals merge with one another. Visually, they are extremely powerful and impressive, but what is actually happening is often shrouded in mystery. In other words, the meaning behind the symbolism of the obvious events is far from clear. Perhaps that is also the movie’s greatest strength: there are no real answers. Everyone has to interpret the events for themselves and, in doing so, create their own reality.
Come to think of it, something along those lines is also mentioned near the beginning of the movie. You have to explore your own world, you consist of two individuals, and so on. Since this is only the second movie by José Mojica Marins that I’ve seen, I think it’s too early for me to draw any conclusions about the matter, but I am absolutely convinced that this kind of philosophical questioning, where the viewer has to figure out the answers for themselves in some way, is synonymous with this very fascinating filmmaker!
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