I saw O Espinho Da Rosa (The Thorn of the Rose) at ZIFF. It is a mystery-horror film with socio-political undercurrents, by first-time filmmaker Filipe Henriques.
Not bad but not that excellent to win awards!
One thing that every horror movie has in common, and that is the lack of common sense, lack of survival instinct of the characters. The film handles it okay but not quite well.
The down-side of the film is the added romantic overtone, too much screen-time focus on characters'beauty, to cover the not-sustained tension, which in turn overpowers the mysterious theme that the film is intended to sell to its audience.
The filmmaker attempts to make the mysterious twists revolve around the misunderstanding between the characters, but it is not believable, due to lack of acting-directing synchronization. Furthermore the director puts too much focus on the romantic scenes. He could have trimmed some of them out, and the film would be better.
The Exorcist films work no matter how many times they remake them because of effective use of tension. It must be efficiently and effectively built to keep the audience engaged.
The actor's /actress' beauty only covers up these flaws for a short time. Then, the other components in the film fail to keep the audience in suspension of disbelief. The filmmaker could have used the cognitive estrangement of its target audience to promote suspension of disbelief.
In horror-mystery films, the characters must gather their courage to venture into the unknown. The unknown plays into our most basic root of fears: the dark, the unknown, the forbidden. Stepping into the darkness is universally recognized as scary. The imagination tends to run wild in the dark. The film has many dark moments but not all of them are good for tension buildup. A good director would capitalize only the needed ones. The rest could be even cut out in the director's shooting script rewrites, even if the writer has them in the original script.
