reVIEW (26)
FRAGILES (FRAGILE)
[3 of 3]

Mercy Falls Children’s Hospital on the Isle of Wight is in the process of shutting down. With only eight children left in the ward, and a skeleton staff to keep things running, Amy Nichols (Calista Flockhart) is brought in, after the sudden departure of the previous night nurse.
It isn’t long however, before Amy discovers something is terribly wrong in Mercy Falls, something that causes children’s bones to break inexplicably, something that haunts the deserted halls and abandoned floors of the hospital.

Fragiles (Fragile) is Jaume Balaguero’s third feature, and in many ways, it’s the closest he’s come to mainstream horror. Taking a premise, setting, and threat that are genre conventions, Balaguero gives them all enough of his own personal spin to make this one a worthwhile watch.
As with anything shot by ace cinematographer Xavi Gimenez, Fragiles looks great. And with an effective central performance by Flockhart—who largely manages to make the audience forget the manic insanity of Ally McBeal with her haunted portrayal of Amy—there is much to recommend here.

Admittedly, I do miss Balaguero regulars editor Luis De La Madrid and composer Carles Cases; all due respect to Jaume Marti and Roque Banos. However, what haunts Mercy Falls is one freaky-a$$ looking thing that raises the hackles. (And though that doesn’t completely make up for those absences, that does go some way to appeasing me.)
It should also be noted that Paco Plaza (who is co-directing the upcoming [Rec] with Balaguero) did some second unit work on Fragiles.

Yes, compared to Los Sin Nombre and Darkness, Fragiles seems pretty old school, but the narrative and characters are solid, and the direction is as certain and assured as it was in Balaguero’s previous works.
So if you’re into Balaguero (or just enjoy your horror), you really should check out Fragiles.

Parting shot: Among the awards won by Fragiles: the Barcelona Film Award for Best Editing (Jaume Marti, who is also editing Brad Anderson’s upcoming Transsiberian) and the Goya for Best Special Effects.

(Fragiles OS courtesy of tepasmas.com; Fragile OS courtesy of filmaxinternational.com; UK quad courtesy of calistaflockhart.net.)

reVIEW (24)
LOS SIN NOMBRE
(THE NAMELESS) [1 of 3]

In light of the upcoming [Rec], co-directed by Jaume Balaguero (with Paco Plaza), I thought to take a look back at Balaguero’s past films. We begin with Los Sin Nombre.

The year is 1999, and even as the seeds for a paradigm shift in cinematic horror are beginning to flower in audience reactions to Hideo Nakata’s Ringu, another horror revolution, this one less overt though just as important, is taking place in Spain, one of its leading proponents: Jaume Balaguero.

Based on Ramsey Campbell’s novel, The Nameless, Los Sin Nombre opens with Bruno Massera (Karra Elejalde), a policeman whose Missing Persons case leads him to the uncovering of a young girl’s mutilated corpse. Apparently, it’s the six year old girl he’s been looking for, Angela Gifford, and it’s his unwanted duty to inform the girl’s parents, Marc (Brendan Price) and Claudia (Emma Vilarasau, who won two Best Actress awards for the role) that their daughter is now gone.
Though all identifiable marks on the body (fingerprints, teeth, and the like) have been destroyed, Angela’s bracelet is found at the scene, and the case is closed.
Flash forward five years later, and Claudia, now separated from Marc, gets a call, allegedly from Angela, pleading for help. Claudia then enlists the aid of Bruno—who’s just quit the force due to some personal matters—to help her get to the bottom of the mystery.

Los Sin Nombre is an impressive feature film debut by Jaume Balaguero. Surrounding himself with a crack team which includes Carles Cases (original score) and the killer cinematographer/editor tag team of Xavi Gimenez and Luis De La Madrid (who would go on to win awards for their work on Los Sin Nombre*, and, along with Cases, work with the director once more on his second feature Darkness), Balaguero brings this disturbing portrait of the perversion of the innocent and the insidious nature of evil—a theme revisited in Darkness—to the screen with a sure and steady hand.
From the cleverly edited title sequence to its far-from-happy ending, Los Sin Nombre casts a riveting spell on the viewer, as we are plunged, along with Claudia and Bruno, into this dark world of cults and missing children.

As noteworthy a debut as it is, Los Sin Nombre is not without its flaws though, particularly in the character of Quiroga (Tristan Ulloa; Abre Los Ojos), a reporter for a parapsychology magazine who becomes embroiled in the mystery surrounding Claudia and her daughter. Introduced about a third of the way into the film’s running time, the character isn’t given enough screen time to convince the audience of his motivation for risking his job and health in his decision to pursue the sinister matter. Ostensibly, it’s because he’s sick and tired of writing about faux occult rubbish and wants to get to the truly hairy stuff, but that doesn’t really come across. He seems more a narrative appendage, to help move the plot along, than an actual person.
In addition, the film may also move somewhat slowly, for those unwilling to settle into its web of anxiety and dread, which oftentimes reduces to a simmer, but never entirely goes away.

Ultimately, Los Sin Nombre may not be perfect, but it’s nonetheless an arresting debut for Balaguero, and is an excellent warm-up act for his subsequent English-language feature, Darkness.

* Among the many awards Los Sin Nombre won in the year 2000, were the CEC Award for Best Editing and the Sitges (Catalonian International Film Festival) award for Best Cinematography.

(The Nameless OS and third image courtesy of filmaxinternational.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)

THE ABANDONED
(Review)

Nacho Cerda’s The Abandoned is the third After Dark Horrorfest film I’ve seen (the others, Takashi Shimizu’s Rinne and J.S. Cardone’s Wicked Little Things; review in Archive: March 2007), and it’s the best one so far.

We open in Russia, in 1966, where two infants are found in a truck with a dead woman at the wheel.
Flash forward four decades later, and Marie (Anastasia Hille, seen in Po-Chih Leong’s excellent The Wisdom of Crocodiles and Nick Hamm’s The Hole), an American film producer, is contacted by a Mr. Misharin (Valentin Ganev), a solicitor who tells her that she has come into the ownership of a farm in Russia. As it turns out, Marie is adopted, and the farm belonged to her birth mother, who apparently died shortly after she was born.
No sooner does Marie arrive at the isolated farm (completely surrounded by a river; and she can’t swim!), when strange phenomena begin to take place, including Marie seeing her doppelganger, soaking wet, eyes rolled up to their whites.
Shortly thereafter, she meets Nicolai (Karel Roden, recognizable to genre fans from Guillermo Del Toro films Blade II and Hellboy, as well as Paul Hunter’s Bullet-Proof Monk), who may have a connection with Marie, and who is also seeing his own doppelganger, bearing the bloody wounds of what seems to have been an animal attack.
And as the doppelganger sightings become more frequent and violent, neither Marie nor Nicolai can seem to leave the farm…

It’s an interesting premise Cerda brings to our door in The Abandoned. Utilizing a key horror element familiar to fans of the genre (the decrepit house out in the middle of nowhere), Cerda introduces the mystery of the doppelgangers and as a result, gives us a film that actually feels original.
At any rate, it’s certainly not cut from the cloth (sometimes all-too-wearing-thin these days) of the average modern-day horror film, with the long-haired spectre of Asian horror cinema casting its deep shadow over the ghostly proceedings.
Cerda does not even depend on the usual scare tactics of the sudden tandem shock of movement, music, and sound, to get to his audience. (No jumping, yowling cats here.)
Instead, it’s all about the situation and the predicament, with an almost constant sonic layer of voices and whispers, as Marie and Nicolai try to solve the mystery of the farm and their ghastly counterparts.

From Filmax, the production company responsible for much of the excellent non-Asian, non-Hollywood horror films in the recent past (most notably the films of Jaume Balaguero), The Abandoned is largely effective and has an interesting (if downbeat) pay-off. It’s only perhaps in the maintenance of the tension that the film suffers somewhat. The Abandoned isn’t as taut as it might have been, and whether or not you ultimately enjoy this film will be based largely on your patience and ability to lose yourself in a movie.

Having said that, the film does boast Xavi Gimenez as its cinematographer. Gimenez (go-to cinematographer for Jaume Balaguero) has a great eye and has made films like Balaguero’s Los Sin Nombre and Darkness, and Brad Anderson’s El Maquinista visually arresting cinematic experiences. (Interestingly enough, editor Luis De La Madrid, often paired with Gimenez to brilliant effect, is thanked by Cerda in the end credits.)

Ultimately, if you’re a fan of the horror genre, you owe it to yourself to see The Abandoned, if only because it’s quite unlike the typical horror film of the moment. Whether you’ll like it or not will be based on your personal tastes, but at the very least, you can say you had a bite.

Parting shot: The Abandoned is the only one of the eight After Dark Horrorfest films that actually had a theatrical release in the U.S. (Unlike the others, which, following the Horrorfest, were released straight to DVD.)

Parting shot 2: Cerda directed the documentary The Machinist: Breaking the Rules, found on the El Maquinista DVD.

(The Abandoned OS courtesy of wildaboutmovies.com.)