This is probably the movie on my list for the month that I have been most looking forward to seeing. Everything I’ve seen or heard about this film has been great and I always love getting to see some non-American horror. That said, there is a big old warning for this movie where if you’ve got issues with animal or child death/endangerment, that is going to a large portion of the things that happen.

The movie takes place in a version of our world that has some very stark differences that slowly become apparent as the movie goes on. We follow our main characters of Pedro and Jaime, a pair of brothers that live out in the “middle of nowhere” countryside. One night they hear some gunshots out in the woods near their house and when they investigate the next morning, they find a body with some clues that lead them to a nearby woman’s house where one of her two sons has become “rotten”. This is a term used to mean that they have become possessed by a demon and now it’s everyone’s problem. Trying to take care of this problem spirals out of control into a terrifying series of events.

I’ve been intentionally vague on the plot because this is a film I think is best gone into without more than a notion of what it’s about. The world and the way it is different from our own being slowly revealed through the way people talk about things in conversation rather than an exposition dump is so engrossing. The tension between the characters trying to do what is right for them vs doing what they want to do is played perfectly. Things get exceptionally fucked up pretty quickly and Ezequiel Rodriguez as Pedro does such an amazing job of conveying the anguish, confusion, and anger that would come from being in his situation.

That being said, this is an unrelentingly bleak film. If you are the type of person that watched The Mist and thought “That ending was a bit too much” then maybe give this one a pass. Things start off being pretty bad and quickly become soul crushingly awful and it never gets better. This isn’t a movie about overcoming evil. This is a movie about the way in which evil is left to fester and rot by people in charge. How governments and society tend to view things with an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality when it comes to places “in the middle of nowhere”.

The effects on this are also incredible and serve to further make the things that are awful be truly brought to life in grotesque detail. I could go on and on about what this movie does well and I will certainly be looking forward to seeing more from director Demián Rugna.

Score: 5 out of 5