Abuela

Written by Indie Provocateur Carlos Vermut (Magic Girl) and directed by Horror Veteran Paco Plaza (Rec), expectations are pretty high going in.

And La Abuela delivers the goods. For the most part.

The cinematography is exceptional and really helps create a sense of mystery and foreboding.

Almudena Amor and Vera Valdez are perfectly cast as granddaughter and grandmother, bound together in a Madrid apartment after the latter suffers a stroke.

Essentially a chamber piece, the story plays like a dark, modern day fairy tale - a satanic retelling of Little Red Riding Hood perhaps.

While La Abuela might not surprise the audience (the twist being fairly predictable), that does not take away from the overall experience.

It is genuinely creepy and unsettling, in a way that most horror films are not.

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.

It is firstly set in Paris and then Madrid . A Paris model called Susana (Almudena Amor) has to go back to Madrid where her grandmother Pilar (Vera Valdez) who had brought her up, just had a stroke . Susana feels responsible her grandmother , that's why the elderly Pilar became the substitute mother caring along her childhood and adolescence . But spending just a few days with this relative becomes into an unexpected nightmare . Step by step something fantastic , strange and wild will start to infect everyone around the weird apartament . And she starts to experience strong paranormal activity on their home . I was eager to meet you. She's waiting for you . Nobody will love you like I do.

Decent terror movie with thrills , chills , tension , and creepy deeds . Scary and terrifying images when obscure supernatural events emerging from the other side , making sinister and mysterious appearances here and there . At the climax happens shocking and horrific images of diabolic appearances and violent attacks . A scary horror picture shot in fits and starts with disconcerting plot , regarding ghastly and threatening appearances , as a young model suffering from bizarre happenings . The film relies heavily on the two main actresses , the reason for the movie feels somewhat boring and really claustrophobic due to the fact that it is mainly set on a dark flat . The movie is passable, though during the first hour hardly anything happens ; however , the final half hour is frankly terrifying and with full of surprises . Displaying horrifying and creepy images about the young girl being relentlessly stalked by a malevolent and heinous appearance causing creepy , scary , awful and terrible moments . Genuinely horrible moments overcome some obvious plot devices . This is a juicy terrifying material fashioning an iconic possession , providing screams , thrills , shocks and chilling scenes . It has an extremely known premise about an eerie threat that spawns the film in ups and downs . The newcomer and unkown actresses : Almudena Amor , Vera Valdez and Karina Kolokolchykova give acceptable interpretations.

It contains an adequate and sinister cinematography by cameraman Daniel Fernández Abelló , though dark , at times . And frightening , suspenseful musical score by composer Fatima Al Qadiri , adding modern songs by Estopa band . The motion picture was well directed by Paco Plaza , though makes some tiring , slow-moving and extremely claustrophobic. Plaza is a good director with much success particularly in terror genre . He has written or directed with Jaume Balaguero the successful¨ Rec¨ saga formed by : ¨Rec 1, Rec 2 , Rec Genesis and Rec Apocalypse¨ . As well as other terror movies as ¨The second name¨ , ¨Romasanta¨, ¨Christmas tale¨ , ¨Veronica¨and he wrote the American film : ¨Quarantine¨ . He has also made some shorts and documentary : ¨OT¨ . And his only and recent thriller, ¨Quien a hierro mata¨, with Luis Tosar . Rating 6/10 . Acceptable and interesting horror movie . Well worth watching for terror lovers.

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.

I really wanted to like this movie, I have enjoyed previous Plaza's films and the trailer for this one had me intrigued. The film has a great production desing and photography and a creepy score, but the plot was too predictable. Skeleton Key already pulled something like this. And also it was too slow burned for my taste. Glad I waited till it got to streaming.