Howard Phillips Lovecraft loves contemporary horror movies and that needs to be celebrated. Just take a look at reference site imdb.com to see how countless shorts, movies, series, and even video games are produced each year inspired by the metaphysical angst of the author of In the Crypt and The Cthulhu Mythos. And now, in barely a month, the premieres of two audiovisual films based on the same story, Dreams in the Witch’s House, adapted by two of the most important terrorists of recent decades: Guillermo del Toro, in an episode from his Cabinet of Curiosities directed by Catherine Hardwicke and Jaume Balagueró in the Spanish film Venus. With very different visual concepts, production, adaptation, narration, period and interpretation, both stories bear little resemblance in the end. But that’s always inspiring.
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The problem is that neither conformance is convincing enough, either in terms of the essential characteristics of Lovecraft and his satanic terror, nor in their own freely conforming individuality. Balagueró, with Fernando Navarro as co-author, composes a story so autonomous that it is difficult to recognize in it much of the aspect of the original text, beyond the nightmares, the cursed building housing the witches and the presence of the goddess Lamashtu, female demon of pain and despair.
“Gilman’s nightmares usually consisted of dreaming that he was falling into infinite chasms of inexplicably colored twilight and bewildered sounds, chasms whose material and gravitational properties he could not even comprehend,” Lovecraft wrote. On Venus, on the other hand, despite the presence of ghostly dreams, her cosmic angst is much more earthly and revolves around a nightclub dancer who steals a suitcase full of drugs to find a better future, eventually staying at her sister and niece’s house, which is in the demolished buildings of the witches who are being pursued by the mafia. A pastiche that doesn’t quite come together in a homogeneous and attractive style, but that finds its best moments in the black humor of the sequences in which the sorceresses appear who look like lovely neighbor ladies and in the visual and dramatic contrast with the drug dealers who do the want to retrieve stolen hiding place.
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Produced by Carolina Bang and Álex de la Iglesia, with only discreet appearances and an overly sluggish start, Venus seems like a misstep in Balagueró’s career, which has lasted since the public success of Way Down (2021), such a thick bootleg film , was productive , has added in this 2022 one of the best episodes of the second season of the new stories not to sleep: the television, his effective reinterpretation of one of the most famous creations of Chicho Ibáñez Serrador in the key of obsession with home security . In Venus, however, which finally draws a tale of female empowerment in her gory third act, the film’s best, her update doesn’t quite come together, though the melding of cannibalism, divinity, terror, and neighborhood customs already happened in his best work, the great REC.
Venus
Address: Jaime Balaguero.
Actor: Ester Exposito, Angela Cremonte, Magii Mira, and Fernando Valdivieso.
Gender: Terror. Spain, 2022.
Duration: 100 minutes.
Premiering: December 2nd.
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