Para Elisa

I haven't seen a decent Spanish horror movie in a while so I was kind of excited to watch this one. I read up on it and heard some good things and some not so good things but I decided to give it a try.

Beautiful university student Ana is on the verge of graduating with a Fine Arts degree. The grad trip costs 1000 Euros however, and her parents won't give her the money. She finds an ad for a nanny job and calls to arrange for an interview. Things of course are not as they seem when she arrives at the house as she is drugged and finds out she is to be a living doll to a not so young psychotic girl.

This movie plays out like a cross between House of the Devil and Misery (There's definitely an homage to Annie Wilkes). It is pretty interesting for the most part and though it did drag a little in places, the pace always picked right back up. The movie itself is pretty short at about 73 minutes including the credits so there wasn't much of a chance for it to slow down too much. All in all it is worth giving a look-see. 7/10.

"Para Elisa" is a pretty stereotypical nightmare scenario that is very familiar to most horror fans. It is kind of a "fly in the spider web" situation. The lead character, Ana, is a typical college kid looking for a job. Unfortunately this leads her into the clutches of a house of horrors. The characters are developed nicely, the killers more so than the poor Ana. They are clichés of archetypes found in numerous horror films, and thrillers, but Fernandez does an amazing job at keeping the story interesting enough to pull you into the film, and connect with the characters. The cinematography is a key factor in this ability to give "Para Elisa" the right amount of macabre to keep you on edge.

The special effects are not all that inventive, or gut-wrenching. The suggestive nature of the act that puts these effects into play, however, are very gut-wrenching. The true visceral nightmare that makes "Para Elisa" work is the way that Fernandez makes us relate to the traumatic situation that Ana is in, and the horrors she endures at the hands of a truly deranged Elisa-the real Antagonist of the movie. The torture/kill scenes never really get gory, or visceral enough for me personally. Not that they are any less effective in telling the story, I just would have really fell in love with "Para Elisa" had the actual horror elements been captured on camera, and forced me to endure the visual carnage and brutality. I just wish that Juanra Fernandez would have embraced a bit more splatter-gore with this one.

Overall "Para Elisa" is a nice, well produced horror film. It is a worthy film for any horror fan to enjoy- and in my personal opinion, this one is one of the better import horrors that I have seen in a while. A word of caution-the scenes that don't deal with Ana and Elisa do drag the energy of "Para Elisa" down some, not much but it is noticeable. And even though the characters are just the right amount of tortured and the right amount of psychotic, they are redundant in the horrorsphere so not all who watch the movie will be pleased. I for one liked it enough to recommend it.

Director's first effort, I presume? There was a lot of competency shown here. But basically this should never have left the confines of the university it was obviously made in.

Some of the performances are quite good, especially near the start. But then they get let down time and time again by poor dialogue and inconsistent and absurd character construction.

Then, when the action starts, major tactical moments are under-scrutinised, like "that doesn't matter so we're not going to bother showing or indicating what happened". As a result, the audience is left very confused about what exactly is going on.

Then a couple of side-lines are started, then immediately dropped.

Then, finally, the ending is very, very stupid.

I hope the director meets an actual writer and tries again.

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PARA ELISA is a Spanish horror film which enters in a world that is supposed to be naïf and innocent and turns it into a blood bath, a game where innocence turns into creepiness!

It all starts when ANA (played by Ona Casamiquela), a Fine Arts student, answers a job announcement to work as a nanny, in order to get some money to her finalist trip. She goes at the address and enters in a sinister old house full of dolls and other antiques and a sympathetic old woman, DIAMANTINA (Luisa Gavasa), invites her to take a tea… She accepts and after a little conversation the old woman takes ANA to meet her daughter, ELISA (Ana Turpin), the child… but when ANA notices that this "child" has her age (or is even older…) she regrets the job, but it's too late…

It's a nice horror film which creates some tension and has some gore, but it also falls in some typical clichés of the genre. However I appreciated the soundtrack very much, it's effective to create suspense and have some nice and sinister sounds! The acting is fine but not great.