• Sitges Festival: The duplicated and joyful labyrinths of Natali and Zombie

Right now only the president of the Community of Madrid is more scary than Sitges . Much more. The advantage of the film festival is that, despite its irrevocably polymorphic character, panic offers it in a more orderly way. There are patterns. It is not, as in the case of popular politics, to open your mouth to see what happens . Or not always. Friday's day was a good example.

Above the 60th parallel (more or less), from Denmark and the United States , two proposals were calculated and rightly frozen to which the last languages ​​are so prone (think Hereditary ). We talked about The lodge , an almost geometric film exercise signed by the couple Severin Fiala and Venorika Franz , and Suicide tourist , by Jonas Alexander Arnby and with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (our favorite Lannister) inside.

With a warmer temperature and with blood, in addition to much warmer, the very easy comedy that aspires to the phenomenon Wedding Night , by Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin , was presented very easily. And finally, from the south bake, Paradise Hills arrived, a provocation of the Alice Waddington Bilbao (the name is self-imposed) that, already, flees from classifications in a bet on the imagination and the self-confidence without tolls. Indeed, only Ayuso was missing.

Paradise Hills , to begin with below, arrives in Sitges after its presentation in Sundance where it entered all the lists of if not the best yes the least obvious . And that, by definition, makes it good if only because of its stubborn will not to be dragged into any category. Although I played with all of them. The story is set in a boarding school for young people from families well and from there progresses free of ties by all genres that allows imagination and a visual culture without prejudice . From the Final Fantasy video game to the classic series The Prisoner through The Lord of the Rings or the 50's cinema or the not-so-hidden classic The abominable Dr. Phibes , by Robert Fuest, everything is there. Even Milla Jovovich is person.

"What has always bothered me," the director reflects, "is that none of the attractive, determined and determined references that I have handled in my youth were women . I would like the film to inspire girls aged 13 or 14, that they see that the heroes can also be them, that they are women. " And in the quotation marks there is a declaration of intentions that is also provocation and perfect image of a film so convinced of itself and of each of its mistakes that there is nothing left but to surrender. If you were looking for what to fill in the discovery box of the year, congratulations, you have found it.

Frozen environment

And from the most indefinable to the most developable. The lodge is undoubtedly the movie to consider: the one that marks the transit of a festival. And it is because of its rigor both in the staging and in its willingness to prolong the obsessions of the film that made the directors known, the magistral Goodnight mommy (2014). The story contains two brothers and a stepmother in a lost and rigorously snowy house. The children recover from their mother's suicide and his father's wife, the leader of a messianic sect.

Everything works with obsessive precision in a waste of virtuosity that literally kidnaps the viewer's gaze and imprisons it in the depths of their fears. It sounds tremendous and it is. The problem, that there is, is that much of that majestic ability to create environments reminds and sounds too much like works such as Hereditary or The Witch . The sound design, the composition 'polanskiana' ... Call it mannerism. Anyway, it is impossible to let go of the fine thread that sews each plane with the look.

Suicide tourist elevates to the title what can now be described as the hot topic in the matter of terror: suicide. And this also applies to Ayuso, by the way. Jonas Alexander Arnby applies the pattern of his previous work, When the Beast Awakens , to a story further from the genre. Again, coldness, tranquility and tranquility; the ice elevated to the category of omniscient narrator .

A strange hotel is dedicated to making what could be called assisted suicide fantasies. Until there, in the midst of almost everything, comes the protagonist. And suddenly (or not so much), things start to collapse. What is the reality? How to escape it when it hurts? What if death were the only way to continue living? Let's say the questions fall on the screen like a layer of soft snow (maybe too soft). But, without a doubt, the will of style and the rejection of any shortcut or resource more or less result or melodramatic are appreciated. The result is of a depth that surprises in its simplicity. As far from science fiction as close to existential drama . And backwards.

Finally, the production that will most certainly talk more. Ready or not. Wedding night is one of those comedies in which everything is allowed: from slightly rancid costumbrismo to the brave 'gore' going through social criticism. Everything fits in a celebration, very civilized yes, the black comedy of British accent , although it happens in the United States. It is not an Ealing production, it is not the quintet of death , not the signature Alexander Mackendrick, but, with imagination, it could go through an 'aggiornamento' resulton . Of course, the cinema fell apart every time, smeared with blood, the protagonist (very well Samara Weaving) complained about the cannibal tastes of the rich.

In short, a thousand ways to be scary that nothing can against Ayuso.

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