HORROR; 1hr 52min (Spanish with subtitles)
STARRING: Belén Rueda, Lluís Homar, Pablo Derqui
Don’t look now: Rueda
Beautiful, feline, intense Julia (The Orphanage ’s Rueda) is losing her sight. After she and her psychologist husband, Isaac (Homar), discover the body of her already-blind twin, Sara (Rueda again), the general assumption is that Sara has hanged herself because she can’t bear the loss of her sight. Julia, however, is convinced that Sara was killed by a man she was newly involved with and who no one seems to remember. Her search for him takes her to dark and spooky corners, figuratively because that’s the sort of film this is, and literally as her vision disappears.
Playing it safe is never an option in horror thrillers: their self-fulfilling logic dictates that their unwitting victims set a course to catastrophe. With director Guillem Morales and producer Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) as ringmasters, Julia makes wilful and terrible choices, then pays for them with all guns blazing in a fallout that hurtles from mildly deranged to outright demented. Safely mainstream this is not. But what a crazy way to go.
