Tomorrow I will kill you all

A grandfather named Manuel's wife dies tragically.

He is forced to live in his son's apartment, with his daughter-in-law and granddaughter.

Grandpa doesn't fit in, he mumbles in the solitude of his room, he talks to spirits, his daughter-in-law thinks he's up to something.

One day, at dinner time, Manuel breaks his silence and gives a warning: “Tomorrow I am going to kill you all.”

This is the beginning of

Viejos

, a Spanish horror film whose story was written before the pandemic, but to which the scriptwriters logically added aspects inspired by a time so tragically related to the lives of the elderly.

I am not going to write “our elders” because that plural implies an ethical commitment that our society fails to comply with to a greater or lesser extent with that part of the population.

It chills the blood to hear the tone of Isabel Díaz Ayuso speaking about the irremediability of death in those nightmarish days, as if the only thing that should matter about those citizens is whether they were alive or dead and not how they took the last step of life. his existence.

Those who suffer are helped to die, but what to expect from unscrupulous politicians who defamed Dr. Montes for defending a dignified death.

It would seem that the Madrid president is not aware that the cocky tone is unusual in this matter.

He has a thousand opportunities to use it in other debates, but it seems that he trusts that this traditional and lame speech is the key to his success and he no longer knows how to distinguish between the different registers of language that lead us to speak lower or louder. depending on where we are and colloquially or seriously according to the topic we address.

That awareness of the tone in which one speaks is being lost: if a woman or a man's arrogance gives them income and votes in politics, they will embark on a path of no return.

But this matter is extremely serious: we are talking about people on the verge of death who were clinging to the bars of a bed, desperate for suffocation.

Far from their children, far from the old home and the neighborhood where they lived their lives.

Within the thousand stupid and heated debates that fuel our daily lives and that in the end the only thing they denote is that indignation is part of our privilege, we should stop and think about what role the old people play in this comedy, and yes, I mean old people. because I consider it a purer and nobler word than all those others that, wrapped in the corset of correction, hide deep down a condescending look that frees us from a firm commitment.

What would happen if a pandemic returned, a fatality that is within the possible?

Nothing has changed.

We shake our heads when we find out that a residence has received moldy or wormy food.

The relatives are attentive, they do what is in their power, but it should be a matter of the first order.

We are all always on the verge of being old, although in this society of elongated youth there are many unwary people who live ignoring it.

Old men and women, who in a large percentage will face this future that is already coming alone, without offspring to take care of them and separated from any public debate.

Because being old is that, that your voice does not count, that others speak for you, that they speak to your ear in a childish tone, that you are considered a being without desires, without will, without sovereignty, at the expense of surrender of your daughters or whatever your savings allow.

My friend, the screenwriter Javier Trigales, speaking about

Viejos,

told me that the horror genre is even more truthful than social cinema because, ultimately, it talks about our fears and fear is largely what conditions our way of being in the world. world.

One night, at dinner, old Manuel warns, “tomorrow I will kill you all.”

That phrase is the voice of a collective revenge that we should not take lightly.

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