FrightFest Halloween review – Hablando con extraños (Talking to a Stranger)
Adrián García Bogliano has made horror films in Mexico (Ahí va el diablo) and the US (Late Phases). He always puts a fresh spin on what seem to be familiar premises – this domestic ghost story, which is roughly in the Grudge-Insidious-Paranormal territory, explores mental health issues, a complicated family dynamic, the presence of ghosts as dreams (and sounds) and alternative therapies (hypnosis, something like exorcism) while giving a showcase role to Gigi Saul Guerrero, best known as a filmmaker. In a disorienting first act, the viewpoint character is a little boy, Chris (Yago Andreu Sandoval), first seen playing with a Rubik’s cube in a cluttered bedroom as Silvia (Patricia Calzada) tells him a bedtime story which turns out to be a wildly inappropriate tale of domestic abuse and murder-suicide … then Patricia (Guerrero), Chris’ actual mother (who is pregnant), comes into the room too late to tell him the story she has promised and finds Chris asleep.
The next day, Chris talks about having a nightmare – then a set of trivial circumstances, including his father Andres (Eugenio Rubio) preventing Patricia from tidying up the boy’s room because he needs to learn to pick up his own toys, lead to a horrifying situation with the lad, who has been playing with matches, trapped in a burning room while Patricia can’t get through a door jammed by a toy plane because of her baby bump. Then, four years later, we find out this is a memory, perhaps scrambled, perhaps influenced by a malign presence which latched onto the family and is busy whispering in their new home. Patricia blames her new daughter, her husband and herself for Chris’s death – but not the dead boy, who speaks to her or seems to speak to her. Andres, a sound engineer, records the sleeptalking which goes on in his house, and repeat trips to mental health professionals don’t do much but make Patricia cannier about hiding her symptoms. Of course, this is a supernatural horror movie, and she’s not imagining things … though she is misled by the entity which looks like Chris but has a malign, possessive agenda (Bogliano homages that child-to-adult jump scare from Mario Bava’s Shock).
Hablando con extraños revolves around Guerrero’s performance – which is mercurial and infinitely complicated as Patricia is by turns mad but pretending to be sane, desperately needy for contact with her dead son and open to the wiles of a monstrous presence, a super-mom and a ticked-off woman irritated by the well-intentioned actions of everyone around her. She’s moving and terrifying and goes deep into a particularly Mexican brand of family horror – she is, in the end, another incarnation of the Crying Woman, become monstrous after the death of her child.
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