Rating: B-
Dir: Paco Plaza
Star: Maru Valdivielso, Christian Casas, Roger Babià, Ivana Baquero
a.k.a. Cuento de Navidad
Despite the title, there isn’t anything particularly festive about this. Sure, the main antagonist is clad in a Santa suit. But it’s not especially significant, since it was simply the disguise Rebecca (Valdivielso) wore to help her escape after robbing a bank. Through circumstances which are never made clear, she ends falling into a pit in the woods, where she is found by a group of local twelve-year-olds. Discovering she’s a fugitive, they decide to starve her into giving up the loot. She’s not happy about this, to put it mildly, and when she gets out of her prison, all the kids are going to be placed firmly on the naughty list.
This is firmly set in 1985, with a lot of cultural touchstones to prove it. It might seem like a Stranger Things rip-off, if it hadn’t come out more than a decade earlier. For instance, one of the children is obsessed with The Karate Kid – and I must say, this has a delightful and unexpected payoff. It’s not just an empty reference. There’s also a fictional movie, Zombie Invasion (you might recognize Elsa Pataky in it), which also proves relevant, in how the kids deal with their pursuer, and how she deals with them. This unfolds in an amusement park closed for the winter, and earns a bonus point for unexpected Yes Sir, I Can Boogie – even if it is a little early for the period.
One of the factors is the different personalities of the kids. Some have that brazen callousness of the young, while others are more doubtful about the plan to torture their prisoner. In particular, the only girl in the group, Moni (Baquero), is mostly sympathetic to Rebecca, trying to bring her food. [By coincidence, the previous night, we’d finished off Spartacus: House of Ashur in which Baquero also stars. Let’s just say, she’s all grown-up now…] There’s a resulting tension, though when push comes to shove, they stand by each other. There’s a pointed lack of grown-ups here. Outside of Rebecca, the only other real-life adult is the local police officer, and you never get to see his face. This is almost like a horror version of Peanuts.
It’s a gradual drift into horror. The early going is close to a kids’ adventure movie, but the tone steadily becomes darker, the longer it goes on. Fantastical elements creep in too, the young fans of Zombie Invasion deciding to re-enact a voodoo ritual from the movie, because… Yeah, that’s another area where the plot is a little deficient. And would it have hurt them to kill off… anybody? However, there’s easily enough good here to merit the benefit of the doubt, and it kept me consistently engaged throughout. This is a huge improvement over Plaza’s feature debut, Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt, and it makes sense why he would go on to become one of Spain’s most successful genre directors.