This time Netflix couldn’t avoid the spoiler. Nor did he know how to stop the theories and assumptions that, right on track, were forged on social networks among the most fanatical. But it is the toll that is paid when a master of horror cinema of the stature of Paco Plaza moves to the distributor to direct his next film. One visit to the set and everything is under suspicion. And no, it is not the Vallecas of the 90s, but it is hot. This time, it is in a natural area in Valencia, close to Gandía but where you can’t even see the sea, between two mountains is the Cotalba monastery and “silence!”, it is filmed.
It is set in a post-war Spain, where the real monastery becomes a convent in fiction and the monks become nuns. ‘Sister Death’ is the new film from the director of ‘[REC]’, ‘Verónica’ or ‘Who kills with iron’ and spoiler: no, it is not another horror story about nuns, even the title of the film itself gives clues. ‘Sister Death’ is the nickname of one of Veronica’s characters. The director implies that this new fiction is a prequel, which “will help us better understand the things that happened there” and recovers that universe through “some characters and there will be several surprises that connect both films.”
And that’s it for now. The story begins with Narcisa, played by actress Aria Bedmar, a young novice who has arrived to become a teacher in a convent, which is no longer one because the nuns transform it into a school for orphan girls. Her supernatural powers lead him to perceive secrets that surround this convent.
The team has continued working despite the visits, even despite the weddings and events hosted by the monastery of Saint Jerome of Cotalba, which are not few. Even the guides have become accustomed to giving the explanation of the monument declared an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC) between the “cut” and the “action” after almost two months of filming. It wasn’t easy finding the location for the film’s art and production teams, but it fit for Plaza, who later realized; I had never recorded on his land before.
Among orange trees, watered by the sun and with a Mediterranean aroma, it is the place that Paco Plaza was looking for, one where a fiction film could seem like a true story. «Our aesthetic bet was to try to avoid the images that we all have in our heads of a horror movie in a convent. We wanted to give it a very own and very local identity, because that is what later becomes universal, I think that is what seduces, when cinema opens a window to the world, and does not force reality, it is a place that we love, “That gives the film a personality in some way,” says the director.
At the entrance to the monastery there is a catering service and as you move towards the cloister the corridors are filled with cables, extension cords, spotlights, panels… The building that housed the austere monks now seems to house another type of congregation with a different habit: they dress in black but they could also practice the vow of silence. You don’t hear anything. The producer, Enrique López Lavinge, and the production director, Alberto Álvarez, act as guides on the route through the rooms where it was recorded and where the plot takes place.
What is not seen and fear in broad daylight
The nuns created by Paco Plaza for ‘Sister Death’ make sweets. The kitchen is an important space in fiction. They have finished recording all the scenes that take place there but the team’s passage through each room leaves traces. There were three interventions in the Cotalba monastery that is now owned by the Trenor family, but the guide of this space of cultural interest likes to joke that the fourth intervention was that of the film team.
The setting created by the art director, Laia Ateca, is barely noticeable, it even seems like just another part of the building. “Last week a lady on one of the visits told me that the tiles on the kitchen wall were beautiful and she asked me what era they were from, I almost didn’t know what to say because they put them in,” says the guide.
The kitchen wall is covered with these blue tiles, which end at eye level. Among them, the director leaves his own nod to the viewer, leaving a dedication to the music and the horror genre. Almost everything is measured in the figuration. The work of the art team has left nothing to the imagination and takes care of every millimeter. His intention is to hit the button of the viewer’s collective memory.
«Everything seems familiar, or we have seen it in photos of our grandparents and our parents or we associate it with childhood, it is very recognizable, it is part of the history that we have been told, of the post-war period and no one could doubt it because the obsession “It has been to create fear from what we all know, from things that are close and to prevent the spaces from appearing to be from other places, from other countries that are far away from us, but from being real,” explains producer Enrique López Lavinge.
There is a lot of light coming in through the small windows and the walls are painted white. The plague epidemics are to blame, with each one of them the walls were covered with lime. But neither light nor white have been a problem for the filming of ‘Sister Death’ because the director was looking for the most real fear, that which is in what cannot be seen in broad daylight.
«It is a commitment to horror cinema that does not shy away from daylight or whitewash, it is a challenge for the director of photography and also for the viewer themselves, because it is not what you a priori expect from a horror film and that Instead of being an inconvenience, it becomes an incentive,” acknowledges Paco Plaza.
White crochet bedspreads cover the small beds, crosses on the wall above the headboards and on the nightstand a small brush, a brass box and a Bible. The small cells of the monks of Cotalba are transformed into rooms for the school girls in fiction and in that of Sister Narciso, the protagonist, even the cracks in the wall have been used.
It was between those corridors where some of the most important sequences were filmed due to their spectacular nature. They tell it in the team. From those two weeks of confinement in the narrow rooms came the most intense scenes of the film. «There is a feeling of living something that only real spaces give you, that exist, it is something that is difficult to achieve with sets. We spent six weeks in the rain, and this feeling was very powerful. “It really is being a complicated and intense shoot,” acknowledges the art director, Laia Ateca.
White is still latent in the locker room and escapes the idea of the nuns’ black uniform. The bet is all on white. «It is something that all departments have had to do, because this film is committed to white, to light, and from there we have had to invent the habits of our nuns, which has a real historical basis from the 50s but which also has a part of fantasy and imagination of nuns that do not exist,” explains the winner of a Goya for the costumes of ‘Las Leyes de la Frontera’, Vinyet Escobar. The costumes are part of the characterization and are 90% made by Escobar’s team, something that does not happen often, she says. “You don’t always have the freedom to design what you want and there is no limit here.”
Poltergeist on set
Two weeks locked in those rooms and it is there, in those corridors that link the nuns’ cells where the most intense sequences were recorded, especially those starring Sister Narcisa. Taking into account that it is the filming of a horror movie, the team could have been suggestive, but what has been happening in one of the rooms is something that the organization of the Cotalba monastery itself keeps secret and does not usually reveal under any circumstances. to visits. “With this, some television program is put together for three seasons,” the guide jokes.
What they claim is that there was a poltergeist, but that the team itself could have altered it. The problem was in one of the heavy and large doors of a room at the end of the hallway. «I am a skeptical person, but it is true that there is a door that we close before leaving and the next morning when you arrive it is open, we had not told this to anyone on the filming team but when they started asking us we had to admit it» says the guide.
The producer acknowledges that no one on the set knew anything, but everyone asked for that door. «It was not an anecdote, it was just that on the fifth day the same thing was still happening, no one dared to enter that room. “We have removed the door and used it for another space, it may be that we have altered this phenomenon,” says Lavigne. And the guide recognizes that this is the only inexplicable thing that happens in the monastery.
The nuns and Paco Plaza
The story of ‘Sister Death’ arises from a secondary character in ‘Verónica’ because Paco Plaza thought that “it had a movie in itself.” That’s where it all started, in a mysterious character about whom little is known: a blind nun, with wounds on her face who at one point explains to one of the girls that it was she herself who was injured.
“If I had been that girl I would have asked her why,” Plaza says. And that is exactly where her new film comes from. Her fascination with nuns ensures that she comes from afar. “I have always liked them,” she explains that it is the uniform that generates the greatest intrigue for her to know the person underneath. «It seems that they were born nuns and at fifty years old, but there is a person behind it, a woman who has a life, and that is reflected in one of the protagonists because the nuns’ uniforms have something of annulment of individuality that I really like. , cancel yourself in the service of something else. “Each uniform has its servitude,” explains the director.
For him they are an enigma and have something mysterious and at the same time truthful. Something that also happened in ‘Verónica’ is the mix between the real and the fantastic. This film allows itself to play with that intrigue of camouflaging a fictional story framed by a location that reveals truth in every corner. The director admits that despite the complexity of the shoot, the challenge has motivated him even more. And again spoiler: “It’s all fiction.”
#Paco #Plaza #explores #fascination #nuns #truth