alserrano

If you have ever been in a multi-venue kind of indie festival, this one hits home very well. The weirdness of the attitudes around, the punchable new indie enfant terrible of cinema that everyone knows are pure grifters, the incisive take on the eternally narcissistic romcoms, the dumbest newest take on what punk is... Both Carrie and Fred know a lot about that world and boy they do have their revenge on certain characters they have faced in their lives.

A few cameos here and there makes thing even more entertaining. But anyway, among with the Strong Bad "Baddest of the Bands", the most accurate portrait of that world of bs.

A common denominator in most of the Shudder movies is that the colours are always amazing, that there is good directing and good casting and that they barely have anything to tell. La Llorona is much better than the Blumhouse one, of course, and its tale where the real horrors intersect with the mythical ones is cool. And the set design is incredible. And the casting does a wonderful job.

But there is barely any character work or any narrative that deserved more than 45 minutes here. I am ok with long shots, but if they appear in the context of some more standard narrative, or if they are used for something else than fill up time. So, a beautiful package, but not that much inside and way less deep it pretends to be.

The setup for the plot is fantastic, actors are good, the locations are also incredible, and Mario Camus is really gifted at framing shots but his way of telling a noir story is through many scenes of two characters sitting and talking in overexpository sentences. There is a point, around half an hour in, that most of those dialogues are redundant to what it is being told visually, while other characters would have benefited from more screen time.

It's like Camus was afraid of doing what the story logically asks for: suspense and violence. I really like him as a director but sometimes he was lost in his "directing as if I am writing a book" ways.