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FrightFest review – Y todos Ardéran (Everyone Will Burn)

FrightFest review – Y todos Ardéran (Everyone Will Burn)

This complicated, impressive Spanish horror film is set in a small town where – local legend has it – once a righteous mob prevented the apocalypse by destroying a demon child, and the townsfolk seem to have picked up a taste for persecuting outsiders and to be eagerly intent on going through the whole thing again.  Lucía (Sofía García), a little girl with dwarfism, walks out of the wilderness and is adopted by brittle, eccentric María José (Maraena Gómez), whose young son was bullied to suicide some years earlier – a crime which went unpunished because the chief perpetrator was the Mayor’s son.  Lucía manifests Damien/Carrie-type supernatural powers – spontaneously combusting a couple of cops who hassle María José and casting cold eyes on a range of other bullies, establishment hypocrites, connivers and gutless wonders.  It’s a riff on The Omen where Damien is in the right, but the focus of the film is on Gómez – the star of the aptly-named Sexykiller – as a character who might have come out of an Almodovar movie … a putupon divorcée who alone has shouldered the burdens of grief and guilt, but also a style icon and a potential furious avenger.  It takes its time to illustrate the Peyton Place-style shortcomings of everyone in town and to tease out the backstory, then builds to a satisfying apocalypse (its plot might have been modelled on Dogville as much as, say, The Day of the Beast).  Written by Javier Kiran and director David Hebrero.

Here’s the FrightFest listing.

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