A lesbian love session is followed by a knock at the door and a psycho killer carving one of the girls up. Next we cut to a different group of characters, typical family on vacation in Mexico. The two kids (one girl, one boy, both in that ‘awkward’ stage of development) go wandering off up to the mountains and inside a cave.and don’t come back by the end of the day. Their parents (who had been enjoying some alone time ifyouknowwhatimean) call the cops, and wait anxiously in their hotel room.having a giant row, blaming each other for the day’s events. The next morning the kids turn up, seemingly unharmed. Oopsy.
However, after a while it becomes apparent that something is not quite right with the kids, who also appear to have an unnaturally close bond. They seem.possessed or something. Just what in the hell happened to them in those missing hours, and what, if any connection is there to the killer in the opening of the film?
Written and directed by Adrian Garcia Bogliano, this 2012 Spanish supernatural film will remind you of films like ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, ‘The Last Wave’, ‘Don’t Look Now’, and ‘Dust Devil’ among others. It’s fascinating, disturbing.and it almost comes off. Almost, but not quite. There’s a good supernatural horror film in here, but an ill-advised trip to vigilantism and an awful ending that doesn’t resolve nearly as much as Bogliano thinks, help pull this one back a bit, unfortunately.
The film immediately grabs you, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no better way to open a film than a sweet lesbian love scene. However, it’s not long before a brutal killer comes along, and this guy is immediately unsettling. Sick, animalistic, psychotic, and something of a human black hole. It’s a helluva opening five minutes that the film sadly never quite lives up to on the whole. We also get a really interesting display of domestic disharmony from our central married couple, as they blame each other for losing the kids (he’s a pervert for wanting sex, she’s a slut.because), and then early the next morning.whoops, the kids have been found. How do you reconnect after an argument like that? By having hot, sweaty sex, apparently.
The film may play out a tad slow for some, but there’s something quietly creepy and unseemly about it. But then our central couple decide to become vigilantes, and the film stops dead for me. I usually dislike serious-minded vigilante films, because I find the idea of seemingly ordinary people doing this kind of thing implausible. There’s no way the couple in this film would slice and dice a guy like they do in the film. You need to give us some kind of indication leading up that they are capable of this. And the filmmaker can’t do that, because he knows these characters really wouldn’t do something like that. It’s an implausible and sick moment of unnecessary and unbelievable violence that the film simply didn’t need. Yes, it’s just one scene, but it throws the whole film out of whack, because you now don’t believe these characters are the same characters who just dissected someone mercilessly and brutally. Meanwhile, the film needs to be docked points for cribbing one very obvious FX moment from ‘The Entity’, a seriously underrated paranormal horror film. If you’ve seen that fine film, you’ll spot the moment here immediately.
OVERALL SUMMARY
It’s weird, disturbing, sometimes effective, but almost isn’t good enough, and this one’s just shy of being good enough. It could’ve been a fine supernatural horror film if it wanted to focus solely on that, but as is, it doesn’t quite come off. It sure beats ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’, though. I’ll give it that.
