FrightFest Halloween review – Parvulos (Párvulos Hijos del Apocalipsis)

FrightFest Halloween review – Parvulos (Párvulos Hijos del Apocalipsis)

A cabin in the woods … a society-ending pandemic … cannibal zombies … a brutal survival regimen … an intruder into a tight-knit family group … and the threat of ‘the fire trumpets’.  In Parvulos, Mexican writer-director Isaac Ezban (The Similars, Parallel) scrambles familiar SF-horror tropes (several are on view, for instance, in Alexandre Aja’s Never Let Go) in a refreshing, engaging new way.  The film which proceeds from the assumption that the only constants in the world are ‘family and change’.

In the middle of a vast forest, one-legged teenager Salvador (Farid Escalante Correa) tries to keep his younger brothers Oliver (Leonardo Cervantes) and Benjamin (Mateo Ortega Casillas) alive despite the end of the world.  What Salvador has shared with the more mature Oliver but kept from the impulsive Benjamin is that the monsters chained in the basement are the teeth-gnashing infected zombie remains of their parents (Horacio F. Lazo, Norma Flores) who managed to set up this retreat with bicycle-powered electricity (the only film they can watch on TV is The Congress), a trusty crossbow (‘Guillerma’) and the means to hunt or cultivate stray dogs, rats and worms for food.  Filmed in near-monochrome, the film begins by establishing the routine whereby the brothers maintain some sort of stasis in survival … then has various elements force change, starting with Benjamin’s insistent refusal to obey the ‘keep out’ signs and stay away from the basement … then with the arrival of survivor girl Valeria (Carla Adell), who has news about a cure being dropped by Russian red cross planes (anti-vaxxers will not be surprised to learn how the cannibal zombie thing got started in the first place), another possible fault line opens up between the pre- and post-adolescent brothers.  Noé Hernández, from Tenemos la Carne/We are the Flesh, shows up late in the day and gives a bravura guest turn in comic menace mode.

Parvulos is about kids (‘hijos’) and is very good on kid behaviour, which is sometimes as much of a strain for the audience as for Salvador – Casillas is excellent as a boy who’d be enormously difficult to cope with in the best of times.  The younger brothers shirk work, make impossible demands and even venture into transgressively dubious amorality to the point when you have to ask whether family loyalty is actually an admirable virtue or an excuse for terrible atrocities (this is a strong theme, surprisingly rarely addressed in end-of-the-world films).  Ezban’s genre films tend to be grim but witty, and this works in enough jokes and satiric flourishes to take the edge off the doominess.  The end credits play over childish crayon drawings which replay the film in a lighter, perhaps more callous form.  The cultural after-effects of the pandemic are showing up in more and more genre films – possibly, in most movies of the last two years – and here get a thorough chewing over.