THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
There is no good horror film that is not based on the assumption of a common, familiar, even banal experience. This is the case of the new film by Paco Plaza (which won the Jury Prize at the last Fantastic Film Festival in Gérardmer, in the Vosges). If the rhetoric used is determined by the conditioning of a spectator who has come to get his dose of thrills, the story in the service of which it is used is built on a trivial reality, a test both feared and perceived as inevitable, as making part of life itself. The extraordinary of vampirism and the ordinary of old age form, in Abuela, a singular and disturbing mixture.
Susana, a young Spanish top model, is called back from Paris, where she hopes to start an international career. She learns that her grandmother, Pilar, suffered a stroke, which left her paralyzed. Forced to take care of it and put in place the conditions for her future, Susana seems resigned to cohabitation with the impotent old woman. Behind closed doors in a large Madrid apartment, a relationship is formed in which attention to the other, the care given to them, the confrontation with a body that is too heavy, too motionless, too insensitive, a mind weighed down by illness, become the very substance of a daily life without quality and a life without an immediate horizon.
The suspense of the film very quickly rests on the uncertainty of a quick return to the (normal?) professional life of the woman with whom the viewer identified from the start. Little by little, however, minor disturbing events occur which transform the relationship between the two characters.
daily ordeal
It is the feelings of the young woman towards the one she has chosen to take care of that will evolve, be reversed. An exasperated and then hateful relationship emerges in the face of the one we imagine for a long time responsible for the daily ordeal that she will make her granddaughter experience. But it is through the conventions of cinematographic horror that the film’s transgressive dimension will emerge.
Paco Plaza builds with economy and know-how the conditions for a disruption that takes place within an almost unique decor
Shaped by a cultural model originating, in particular, from fairy tales or advertising imagery, the common figure constituted by the character of the grandmother will be the subject of a radical transformation, until it ends up becoming reverse. This one gradually becomes the monster, a mysterious being, whose nature the first minutes of the film, enigmatic and incomprehensible prologue, had let suspect.
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