'Venus': Jaume Balagueró transfers Lovecraft's cosmic terror to his local customs

Contemporary cinematic horror likes Howard Phillips Lovecraft and that is to be celebrated.

You just have to take a look at the reference website imdb.com to see how countless short films, movies, series and even video games are produced every year inspired by the metaphysical fear of the author of

and

And now, in barely a month, the premieres of two audiovisuals based on the same story coincide,

adapted by two of the fundamental names in terror in recent decades: Guillermo del Toro, in an episode from his

directed by Catherine Hardwicke, and Jaume Balagueró in the Spanish film

With very distant visual concepts, production, adaptation, narration, period and interpretation, both stories end up having little alike.

But that is always inspiring.

More information

Spanish terror knows no limits

The problem is that neither adaptation is compelling enough, neither with respect to the essential characteristics of Lovecraft and his satanic terror, nor in their own free-adapting individuality.

Balagueró, with Fernando Navarro as co-writer, composes a story so autonomous that it is difficult to see in it a good part of the aspects of the original text, beyond the nightmares, the cursed building that houses the witches, and the presence of the goddess Lamashtu , female demon of pain and despair.

"Gilman's nightmares usually consisted of dreaming that he was falling into infinite abysses of inexplicably colored twilight and full of confused sounds, abysses whose material and gravitational properties he could not even conceive," Lovecraft wrote.

On

instead, despite the presence of ghostly dreams, her cosmic fear is much more earthy and is set around a nightclub dancer who steals a suitcase full of drugs in order to find a better future, and ends up staying at home. of his sister and his niece, located in the condemned building of the witches, with the mafias stalking them.

A pastiche that does not quite come together in a homogeneous and attractive style, which, however, finds its best moments in the black humor of the sequences in which the sorceresses appear, looking like adorable neighboring ladies, and the visual and dramatic contrast with the drug traffickers who want to recover the stolen stash.

More information

read movie reviews

Produced by Carolina Bang and Álex de la Iglesia, with only discreet performances and an overly sluggish start,

seems like a false step in Balagueró's career, lately prolific, since the public success of

(2021), a robbery film a so thick, has added in this 2022 one of the best episodes of the second season of the new

its effective rereading in the key of obsession with home security of one of the most famous creations of Chicho Ibáñez serrador.

Now, on

that finally draws a story of female empowerment in its bloody third act, the best of the film, its update does not finish coming together, despite the fact that the fusion of cannibalism, divinity, terror and local customs was already in his best work, the magnificent

Venus

Direction:

Jaume Balagueró.

Performers:

Ester Expósito, Ángela Cremonte, Magüi Mira, Fernando Valdivieso.

Genre:

horror.

Spain, 2022.

Duration:

100 minutes.

Premiere: December 2.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber