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Véronica
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Due to a mix-up, I meant to watch the Mexican
psychological thriller Verónica (Carlos
Algara & Alejandro Martinez-Beltran, 2017), but instead got Paco Plaza’s
Spanish horror film of the same title and the same year. Never mind. Trusting to
serendipity, I decided to plough ahead.
This Verónica is based (loosely, apparently) on a real-life 1992 case from Madrid, in which
cops arrived at an emergency scene to witness “rationally inexplicable”
occurrences and many scary traces in a small, working-class apartment. Then the
film winds back a few days to show – to hypothesise, in a sense – what led up
to this event.
What the cops did actually see (according to this
film) on that fateful day is withheld from our gaze until the ending. In its
place, Plaza gives us a brilliant transition that is sure to be copied many
times hence: from a close-up of the teenage Verónica (Sandra Escacena)
screaming, we pass to her mouth open in an everyday yawn.
Alas, the film doesn’t live up to the promise of this
single, great touch. Once immersed in Verónica’s school life, it’s down to that
institution’s basement for a spot of Ouija – ominously coinciding with a total
eclipse of the sun. (All the kids not spooking it up in the basement are
instructed to gaze at this eclipse through protective strips of film!)
An evil spirit duly possesses our heroine, and she
takes it (along with the broken Ouija board) home to the apartment where her
overworked mother rarely spends time, and three other, highly vulnerable, little
siblings toddle around (the kid performers, including Iván Chavero as bug-eyed
Antoñito, are terrific).
In its long, middle stretch, Verónica, like so many horror-thrillers, feels the necessity to puff
itself out with potential, added complications. These are, in themselves,
intriguing – shadowy memories of Verónica’s father; the onset of her
menstruation, à la Carrie (1976); the
suggestion that she is simply foisting her violent hallucinations upon others –
but they end up just as red herrings to delay the catastrophic, final evening
at home.
There’s no greater or more general metaphor at play;
it really is, finally, only about the bad luck of playing with a Ouija board
and getting zapped by and with a bad spirit dude – like a thousand other horror
movies, better and worse than this one. The
Entity (1982), it ain’t.
Plaza was Jaume Balagueró’s collaborator on the [REC] series (2007-2014). He gives this
project a flashy, TV police-procedural ambience – and documentary archival
photos of the photographed evidence give an undeniable, closing-credits frisson
– and yanks up the soundtrack volume (while the set shakes) whenever we reach a
horror crescendo. There isn’t much of any novelty going on here.
Footnotes: a reference to the classic Spanish horror film, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s ¿Quién
puede matar a un niño? (1976) – an avowed
influence on Lucile Hadzhilalovic’s superb Evolution (2015) – is deftly worked into proceedings (in both a clip from that film, and
in the presence of a Don't Look Now-style
old, blind nun nicknamed “Sister Death”, played by Consuelo Trujillo); and,
less meaningfully beyond a vague allusion to spirits, Ana Torrent is cast as Verónica’s
harried, single mother – over 40 years after her classic child roles for Víctor
Erice (The Spirit of the Beehive,
1973) and Carlos Saura (Cría cuervos,
1976).
© Adrian Martin 5 January 2018 |