Right before Luis Buñuel returned from his long sojourn into the bowels of low budget Mexican cinema to his rightful place as surrealist filmmaker supreme, he released The Young One. This film is more in line with his earlier masterpiece Los Olvidados, a crushing Neorealist examination of children living in poverty. The Young One follows Traver, a young black jazz musician on the run after a woman falsely accused him of rape. He makes it to a small island inhabited by Miller, a curmudgeonly sour racist living with the young daughter of his deceased business partner. As with many early films dealing with racism, The Young One pits Traver and Miller against each other in a battle of wills. But Buñuel is interested in more than just race. He turns a keen eye to Evvie, the young girl, who is molested by Miller. Buñuel seems to portray Miller as an archetypal "bad" person with Traver being his symbolic opposite. The film is gratingly unnerving. Buñuel always knew how to make his audiences squirm ever since his first film Un Chien Andalou with its famous eyeball-incision scene. Both Traver and Miller embody a stifling energy that feels like it might burst out and explode at any second. Indeed, this was the first step towards Buñuel cinematic reincarnation.
8/10
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