"A one-of-a-kind cinematic experience as well as an emblematic title for the new wave of Spanish filmmakers of the early Eighties. (...) Such filmmakers as Alex De La Iglesia and Almodovar repeatedly professed their admiration for the film and pointed out the enormous influence it had had on their work. (...)

Watching it we are invited to share the director's naked self, his personal demons, and his difficulties in surviving.

Arrebato emerges as an astounding meditation on the power of cinema, and on the complex relationship between images and reality; Zulueta's work has a deep metaphysical quality that makes it a timeless, landmark work. Zulueta is not afraid of aiming high, as proven by the use of the Fantastic in order to give cinema a mythical aura. (...) Arrebato mixes genre and experimental cinema with a confidence that has rarely been equalled. (...)

Zulueta's hypnotic direction and his manipulative use of time may recall the work of David Lynch, while plot development and twists predate Cronenberg's Videodrome.

Arrebato functions as an intoxicating experience which demands much from the viewer, both physically and mentally. Yet once you become immersed into the film (or rather, once it becomes immersed in you), you just need more and more. (...)

Arrebato is about living for cinema, and giving all of oneself to it."

OFFSCREEN
Roberto Curti

"A perfect and disturbing work. (...) A film that freely, skillfully and poetically links vampirism, drugs, voyeurism, hallucinations, the alter-ego and movie-going in a free and mature manner and with perfect coherence. This is a cryptic but highly suggestive work, related to horror and fantasy cinema and to the underground culture as well. Arrebato stood immediately as a lonely monument. "

EL MUNDO
Roman Gurban

"One of the most vigorously creative works in the history of Spanish cinema. The film was premiered almost unnoticed but its on-going screening at different cinemas made it a cult movie. According to Carlos Herrero's book, "Ivan Zulueta, the avant-garde against the mirror," Ronald Schwartz had said that if the film was dubbed in English and its captivating comments on sex and drugs were accessible to American cult audiences, the film would have more success than in Spain. Time has turned Arrebato into an "exceptional film, one of the most vigorously creative works and, without a doubt, the most disturbing," according to Carlos Aguilar in Flash Back."

EL PAIS
Diego Galán

"Cinema that stays (...) Arrebato is a dark instant of pessimism. It is complex cinema as well as unfathomable somewhere in its twisted and tumultuous journey. And it is, above all, raw, disturbing, painful and high cinema. It is still an act of inspiration somehow unrepeatable; it is an island film that underneath its solitude it has created a path, it has many followers and is relevant to all of us even today."

EL PAIS
Angel Fernández Santos

"One of the most amazing feature films ever made in Spain."

EXPERIMENTAL CONVERSATIONS
Albert Alcoz

"Undoubtedly Arrebato is the reference work of a cinema (in fact of a great part of society) trying hard to get back lost time in a Spain that had started to shake off the burden of the previous forty years. The idea of the image used for the narration of the film is completely modern (and even today it is amazing). Arrebato's visual, narrative and conceptual audacity is insulting. It is a free film in the complete sense of the word and it does not require any more descriptive adjectives. But Ivan Zulueta's film is much more than a free film. It is about claiming a mad and furtive love, (...) condemned to tragedy (which is not to failure): It is the love between the film director and its cinematic device."

CONTRAPICADO
Carlos Balbuena

"An unusual and wonderful film; a key title of Spanish cinema..." Arrebato is a suggestive, unique, and without a doubt, autobiographical story about an unsatisfied film director with his work and his life, two realities that are around the same thing. This is both a fantasy film and a film about life that alternates the hallucination produced by drugs with the hallucination produced by the movies and its myths, with references to Betty Boop, Metropolis, King Salomon's Mines, Mae West, Frankenstein... Arrebato presents itself as an unusual, rounded, underground exercise, a dreadful but necessary label here, that succeeds at creating a magic atmosphere, making audiences switch from a smile to horror."

LA VANGUARDIA (09/05/1981)
LI. Bonet Mojica.

"One of the best stories of the Spanish cinema (...) it is a fable on life and cinema's vampirism.

EL CULTURAL
Sergi Sánchez

"A genuine cult title, Zulueta's deeply eccentric, brooding and mysterious underground oddity was a significant early influence on Almodóvar while remaining barely known outside Spain. A hallucinatory, claustrophobic examination of the secret potency of film itself."

TIME OUT LONDON FILM GUIDE

"There are films that (...) are there to be watched, or even better, to be experimented. Arrebato is a film whose greatness, like with the great works, goes beyond it s technical, visual and narrative values. The film is a spiral of atmospheres, premonitions, textures, forms and the abyss. It incorporates many places, worlds and universes. The cinema, the cinema inside the cinema, drugs used like a rigorous source of inspiration, childhood, childhood's dreams that are buried, pain, fear, loneliness, love, some loves..."

MIRADA DE CINE
Alejandro Díaz

"A cult Spanish film par excellence. Disturbing treatment of cinema's vampire power. And Ivan Zulueta's master work, his one voice silenced for ever, soon after the premiere of a film, ahead of its time."

EL PAIS
G.B.

"Arrebato is timeless. Arrebato survives the passing of time because it is ahead of time. An initiation journey to the movie world together with an excessively advanced cinematic experience for his own time emptied Ivan Zulueta."

EL PAIS
Beatriz Portinari

"A deep reflection on cinema language and its relationship with reality developed with hard intensity. It is an absorbent exercise because it fascinates and discovers a complex discourse based on an uncompromising production. An absence of concessions pushed the film to the level of dammed titles but it also generated a passionate cult."

FOTOGRAMAS

"An unclassified and fascinating story. (...) One of the most interesting films of the last ten years."

EL PAIS
(20/09/1980)
Angel S. Harguindey

"Iván Zulueta's 1979 film Arrebato is notable for its unclassifiable nature. Considered a 'cult film', Arrebato is unequivocally a product of its time: while not exactly marginal, its singularity resides in the mode in which the avant-garde discourse that dominates a considerable part of its length is integrated within a broader genre, fantastic cinema."

EXPERIMENTAL CONVERSATIONS
Alberte Pagán / Esperanza Collado