Abuela

Spanish horror film produced in 2021. Although the movie gives a good dose of tension, the ending is easily predictable. The only person left from the family of the girl who is a model in Paris is her grandmother. He has taken care of her since childhood. This woman is suffering from a cerebral hemorrhage. Her granddaughter is coming from Paris to Barcelona to take care of the old lady. The girl, who took care of him with compassion at first, starts to have terrible times due to strange events at home. A movie with creepy scenes. There are also occasional nude scenes.

I stumbled upon the 2021 Spanish horror movie "La Abuela" (aka "The Grandmother") from writer Carlos Vermut and director Paco Plaza here in 2022. I had not heard about the movie prior to watching it, but I will say that I was lured in by the movie's cover/poster, and the synopsis seemed fair enough.

And now having seen "La Abuela", I must say that this is a slow burn of a movie. The pacing of the narrative from writer Carlos Vermut is really slow and sort of mundane. If you are expecting a great horror experience, then "La Abuela" is not the best of choice.

The storyline was just ultimately too weak and slow paced for my liking. Sure, I will say that the concept of the storyline was definitely interesting, but it was just brutally killed by a very monotonously directed movie that moved ahead in snail pace.

I wasn't familiar with the cast list in "La Abuela", but I will say that the cast actually carried the movie well enough, especially when taking into consideration the severe limitations imposed by the script and storyline.

I managed to sit through the entire movie, but I wasn't particularly entertained, much less impressed. And there wasn't a single scary moment throughout the 100 minutes that the movie ran for.

My rating of "La Abuela" lands on a three out of ten stars. The movie was just lacking in crucial areas and moments to be worthwhile.

Paco Plaza continues to demonstrate his skill behind the camera, but as he did in Veronica, he does not get rid of the gimmicky and plays it safe with the effective. It seems that he has found his comfort zone and does not want to leave that bubble.

The film fails in how predictable it is, as you don't need more than 15 minutes to know how the story and the final climax will develop.

The best is the interpretative duel between the grandmother, magnificent Vera Valdez, and the no less spectacular performance of Almudena Amor, carrying almost all the interpretative weight of the film and coming out much more than successful.

In conclusion, you are left with a bittersweet taste because this director with these actresses should have produced a much more rounded product.

The critical grandmother

La Abuela (The Grandmother) tells us the story of Susana, a model who has to leave her life and her work in Paris to return to Madrid. Ella's grandmother, Pilar de Ella, apparently just suffered a stroke. Years ago, when Susana's parents died, her grandmother raised her as if she were her own daughter. Now Susana needs to find someone to take care of her grandmother Pilar de ella, but what should only be a few days with her grandmother will end up becoming a terrifying nightmare.

I have to say, if you've seen "The Skeleton Key" from 2015, you'll know what this film is about from the beginning, this thanks to the first scene they show, no matter what as the movie progresses they play with the viewer to mislead him into thinking it might be a ghost tape or possible possession; On the contrary, if you haven't seen the tape I mentioned above, it can definitely become an interesting story.

Something interesting is the complicated situation that Susana will go through, she has her life made, she has important things to do and she puts everything on pause to take care of her grandmother, forgetting for a moment the horror genre, the director Paco Plaza shows us in a way briefly how difficult it can be to provide palliative care to a person whose life expectancy is relatively short due to illness.

The film promises much more than it really offers, but the best thing it has are the performances by Almudena Amor as Susana and Vera Valdez as Pilar, on the one hand Susana goes from being the worried granddaughter to being the terrified granddaughter of the strange events that she experiences with her grandmother and Pilar goes from being a needy grandmother to becoming a gloomy being; however, they could have better explained the interaction of the grandmothers with the granddaughters, since it feels like a gap without further character development, almost at the end they show a somewhat important connection, albeit briefly.

Paco Plaza seeks to convey terror with moments of tension with his dark shots, or some creepy images trying to give a sinister atmosphere, but he does not succeed, the problem is that the pace of the film is slow, certainly one would expect a better polished story and little predictable by the director of "REC" or "Veronica" that we can not say they were great tapes, therefore the result is a predictable movie with few scares, nothing out of the ordinary.

Rating: 7.0.

The Grandmother can be a nice addition to the terrifying old people sub-genre. Being a Paco Plaza's film, of course it has some nice scares and dread. But, with a predictable plot, it offers nothing much more other than that.