From My Cold Dead Hands (2024) ‘ Fantasia’ Movie Review

It is easy to understate what a strange, startling beast of a documentary Javier Horcajada Fontecha’s “From My Cold Dead Hands is.” One can undersell it by passing it off as an amateurishly patched-together expose of the rampant gun culture that has America in its tight grip. There are no conspicuous efforts to amp up artistic techniques or flash glimpses of an authorial style.

The tone of the documentary drives its peculiar essence from the motley scraps cobbled together. The subjective slant of the filmmaker has to be gleaned from the disparate patchwork behind the film. It is not the abandonment of a clear perspective the film pushes forth, but through the panoply of scattered fragments, there emerges a sharp sense of politics that is firm, forthright, and hedges no bets on what it is railing against and taking apart.

The rhythm of the film is free-flowing, punctuated by bursts of digressions that emanate from a singular nodal point. Two gun dealers deliberate on a set of cardinal tenets pertaining to arms handling. They foist a clutch of arguments that hammer the undeniable necessity of arms and their incorporation into daily life. Their arguments have only one agenda: to make the use of guns entrenched in the everyday unavoidable and essential for the sake of not just one’s safety but a whole gamut of reasons tied to familial bonds.

Gun rights are primed as not only one’s right and duty butt also linked to the cause of women’s defense from sexual or other aggressions. The reasoning launched by various stakeholders across the board has to be heard in order to be truly believed. The trick is in how the bizarreness gets translated into the most mundane register of existence and normalized. Biblical authority is invoked, and so are heavyweight political campaigns waged on the promise of gun protection. There’s an especially shocking section where the bravado of wielding and gifting guns to women is posited as a way of wooing them and allaying their sour moods, slipping into the grotesque sexualization of the weapon itself.

From My Cold Dead Hands (2024) ‘ Fantasia’ Movie Review — A still from “From My Cold Dead Hands” (2024)

When collated together as it has been in this film, the weight of the escalating gun culture can be truly horrifying and shocking to witness and register. It is one of those things that beggar belief but which you know is enmeshed in reality with the unbending determination to socially sanction what’d be otherwise labeled as the most extreme impulses of man.

The arguments of the dealers are a blunt reiteration of the beliefs that have become inveterately embedded in the fabric of American society, down to the most regular household. It is through learning how to handle arms that family bonding gets to be affected. Siblings connect and fathers train their kids, thus the family unit becomes a stronger unit thanks to the brute force of guns. Even alphabetical sketching books are filled with the nitty-gritty of arms and their components.

“From My Cold Dead Hands” makes the most baroque heightened behavior the stuff of waking reality. From the hiccups and accidents surrounding the very act of holding and aiming the gun to the larger ecosystem that enables a hard-wiring of reckless, loose control of guns and turning it into masculine pride and a rudimentary possession, the documentary is a stinging and terrifying examination.