Raindance Film Festival review – Sacrificios
The opening reel of Mauricio Chernovetsky’s Mexican horror film, which he co-wrote with Alexander Iosjpe, feel like a blend of Aztec blood sacrifice lore – grinning skull-faced monkey-type God of the Dead Mictlantecuhtli gets top billing here, over the more frequently seem in horror winged serpent Qetzelcoatl – with the excruciating domestic farce/horror of The Coffee Table. While his pregnant wife Alma (Frida Astrid) is out teaching a night class in gruesome Aztec sacrifice, accountant Juan (Jorge A. Jimenez) is supposed to be working on a big project while looking after their lively, if strong-willed toddler Andrés (Siddhartha Tonalli). Actually, he has his earbuds in and is masturbating while watching a webcam girl (Costanza Andrade) and doesn’t notice Andrés getting out of bed to fetch his cuddly shark toy down from a shelf above the bath. The lad slips and falls in, dying of a head wound or drowning in the unemptied tub.
Then, it gets into a peculiar spin on The Monkey’s Paw, Pet Sematary and (very much not a usual suspect) Byzantium as the near-catatonic Juan, who is unreachable with guilt, takes a kayak out to sea, possibly to end his life … and spots that shark toy caught up in a tangle of seaweed which turns out to be a slippery cocoon containing Andrés or something which looks like Andrés or something which Juan sees as Andrés. Father and son fetch up on a desolate island outcrop in a restricted area – three soldiers have a mysterious outpost on the next atoll over – and Juan briefly has a sense that the world has been fixed … only he wakes up from a doze to find Andrés, who in uncharacteristically not keen on sandwiches or sweets, chewing on his hand and drinking blood. This sea-changed kid is a vampire and Juan is still so knotted up with guilt that he takes to cutting himself to feed the hungry brat.
Late in the film, Juan is weak from blood loss and dreams of returning home with Andrés only for that to have the worst possible outcome. However, we might question how much of what we see is a dream anyway. Even before Juan gets in his canoe the film suggests that time is out of joint – images of Mictlantecuhtli recur, storms affect electrics, computer screens go red, and even the webcam girl seems to be semi-possessed. The story unfolds in lurches, breaking with regular logic so the film can concentrate on the father’s literally self-inflicted agony and the very physical situation of the island. In the end credits, the film states that it was inspired by the experiences of Checo Rubio – who plays one of the soldiers – on an island like this. The primal, inhospitable landscape is haunted enough even without the Aztec temple trappings and you get a sense that every rock is liable to inflict wounds as deep or potentially fatal as the hungry little kid.
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