Almudena Amor and Vera Valdez in ‘La granny’.
Paco Plaza gives clues from the same credit titles of ‘La granny’, whose typography replicates that of ‘The seed of the devil’, one of the director’s favorite films. Both are stories of possessions that take place practically in a single setting. Except that in ‘La granny’ the devil is old age, which clouds the body and mind of an old woman who suffers a stroke and, we intuit, had a bohemian and wild past. Her granddaughter, who works as a model, must return from Paris to Madrid to take care of the woman who raised her after her parents died in an accident when she was a child.
Almudena Amor, nominated for a Goya for Best Newcomer for her role as an intern in ‘The Good Boss’, and the Brazilian Vera Valdez, Coco Chanel’s favorite and Avedon’s muse in her youth, who does not open her mouth throughout the footage, maintain the weight of this disturbing drama in which the supernatural is slow to appear.
It is not advisable to rush in search of scares. Paco Plaza is increasingly more elegant and restrained in his films. The presence of Carlos Vermut in the script for ‘La granny’ translates into a more refined and synthetic style, without the action leaving the walls of a bourgeois apartment with views of the Retiro where time seems to have stopped.
What seems to be an illustration of the so-called ‘burnt caregiver syndrome’ little by little plunges us into a nightmare in which we have to pay attention to the clues: the stopped clocks, the mirrors, the little bird, the matryoshka dolls… The atmosphere disturbing part of this fable to the sounds of Los Panchos – «clock, don’t mark the hours…»– demonstrates the talent of a director who only in the last bars of the film allows himself to be carried away by a certain sensationalism and truculence.
‘Prisoners of Ghostland’
Nicolas Cage puts himself under the orders of the Japanese Sion Sono in a crazy action film. The role of him, a bank robber who is released from prison and dressed in a leather suit equipped with bombs to fulfill a mission: rescue the granddaughter of a warlord. The film was applauded without prejudice at the last Sitges Film Festival, where references to the Mad Max saga, samurai films, John Carpenter’s films and westerns were found.
‘On a dock in Normandy’
The writer and filmmaker Emmanuel Carrère turns Juliette Binoche into a journalist who, in order to document herself, works as a cleaner in Caen, hiding her identity. The author of ‘The Adversary’, recent Princess of Asturias Award for Literature, adapts ‘El Muelle de Ouistreham’, the novel by Florence Aubenas, which during the 2008 crisis moved to a provincial city and was presented at the INEM French as a newly separated woman looking for a job. The job she got, a cleaner on a ferry that crosses the English Channel, gave rise to a book on job insecurity and the situation of those most affected by the economic crisis.
Director Randall Okita debuts with a psychological thriller in which we will live the anguish of the protagonist (Skyler Davenport), a young athlete who goes blind due to a degenerative disease. When she comes to work at a secluded mansion being raided by thieves looking for a hidden safe, her only means of defense is a new app that connects her with a volunteer from across the country who helps her survive by watching her.
