The critical grandmother
La Abuela (The Grandmother) tells us the story of Susana, a model who has to leave her life and her work in Paris to return to Madrid. Ella's grandmother, Pilar de Ella, apparently just suffered a stroke. Years ago, when Susana's parents died, her grandmother raised her as if she were her own daughter. Now Susana needs to find someone to take care of her grandmother Pilar de ella, but what should only be a few days with her grandmother will end up becoming a terrifying nightmare.
I have to say, if you've seen "The Skeleton Key" from 2015, you'll know what this film is about from the beginning, this thanks to the first scene they show, no matter what as the movie progresses they play with the viewer to mislead him into thinking it might be a ghost tape or possible possession; On the contrary, if you haven't seen the tape I mentioned above, it can definitely become an interesting story.
Something interesting is the complicated situation that Susana will go through, she has her life made, she has important things to do and she puts everything on pause to take care of her grandmother, forgetting for a moment the horror genre, the director Paco Plaza shows us in a way briefly how difficult it can be to provide palliative care to a person whose life expectancy is relatively short due to illness.
The film promises much more than it really offers, but the best thing it has are the performances by Almudena Amor as Susana and Vera Valdez as Pilar, on the one hand Susana goes from being the worried granddaughter to being the terrified granddaughter of the strange events that she experiences with her grandmother and Pilar goes from being a needy grandmother to becoming a gloomy being; however, they could have better explained the interaction of the grandmothers with the granddaughters, since it feels like a gap without further character development, almost at the end they show a somewhat important connection, albeit briefly.
Paco Plaza seeks to convey terror with moments of tension with his dark shots, or some creepy images trying to give a sinister atmosphere, but he does not succeed, the problem is that the pace of the film is slow, certainly one would expect a better polished story and little predictable by the director of "REC" or "Veronica" that we can not say they were great tapes, therefore the result is a predictable movie with few scares, nothing out of the ordinary.
Rating: 7.0.
