Thrillist Entertainment, The Telegraph, New Musical Express, and tsunamis of social media have named one Spanish film “the scariest movie on Netflix” and one of the first splash-making horror films to come from Madrid since The Devil’s Backbone.
Verònica was released in August 2017, but it didn’t gain widespread attention until its Netflix release Feb. 26. Numerous news outlets spent the following March hyping this thing to Conjuring proportions, and even the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival praised it before that. It received acclaim for being a unique approach to the demonic possession trope, which certainly deserves some fresh air.
The titular character is the eldest sister of three who, in the wake of a solar eclipse, makes the same decision we all should’ve made in August: to bust out a Ouija board and use the eclipse to contact her deceased father.
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, this invites a nameless unwanted spirit into her life who plagues her day and night by threatening her younger siblings, appearing in the form of her father and giving her seizures mid-dinner.
It’s pretty refreshing to watch a horror film in another language and set in a different country than Americans are used to. On top of that, the technical elements are sharp, with a lush unsettling score and a soundtrack of songs that all seem to have eerily-fitting lyrics.
The cinematography is impressive too, with lots of long tracking shots and aesthetically pleasing angles. For the first third of the film, I felt sincerely dreadful of what the rest of the movie would bring.
It’s at this point that, in the midst of a tense, eerie scene, rife with anticipation and dread as “Verònica” is approached by the naked corpse of her father, the “unique” film does what 85 percent of non-unique horror films do—busts out the CGI demons.
This was where the film began its descent. The second Verònica can fall back on special effects and popular horror tropes, it has no problem dropping the eerie storytelling techniques that made it enjoyable in the first place.
Things start getting predictable, the tension dies away completely, and what surprise twists the movie does bring don’t differentiate the experience all that much.
The film feels like a cautionary tale about grief and the dangers of being unable to let go of a lost loved one at times. But, this is more or less soiled by the fact that Verònica’s grief for her father isn’t really developed beyond its obvious “I miss you” sentiment, a major problem when this is supposed to be the motivation behind the whole film. Besides, if I wanted to watch a horror film about the process of grief, I’d watch The Babadook, or even It.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Verònica is a trash movie perpetuated by stereotypes and money-hungry producers that seek to deface horror as a genre.
But I guarantee that The Campus will not be one of the papers calling this movie “the scariest movie on Netflix.”
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