The Wasteland
I did not like it at all. It seemed to me one of those films that confuse slowness with depth, silence with tension and showing very little with being elegant. I understand what it is trying to do: a dark, almost rural tale, with a mother, a son, an isolated house and a threat that may be real, mental or symbolic. But one thing is suggesting, and another very different thing is spending the whole film hiding the ball until all that remains is boredom.
The premise could have had something. An empty space, a trapped family, fear growing from outside and from within, a creature or presence that perhaps represents more than it seems. That kind of minimal horror can work very well when there is atmosphere, characters and a sense of danger that becomes unbearable. The problem is that here everything moves so slowly and with so little energy that the tension never really grabs hold.
The film wants to be serious, solemn and metaphorical all the time. You can feel it in every shot, in every pause, in every stretched silence. But that gravity is not enough to turn a simple story into something powerful. At times it seems more worried about looking important than about scaring, moving or building real suspense. It wants to be folk horror, psychological drama, cruel fable and allegory about fear, but it never manages to make that mixture come alive.
Inma Cuesta is good, because she is an actress with presence and she knows how to convey exhaustion, fragility and despair. But even she is trapped in a film that asks her to repeat the same emotional state again and again. Her character sinks, yes, but the script does not give her enough nuance for that descent to be as striking as it should. You see her suffer, but you do not always care with the necessary force.
Roberto Álamo also brings intensity, although he appears inside a story that does not fully know how to use his conflict either. The family relationship could have been the heart of the film: the father’s fear, the mother’s protection, the child’s gaze, the transmission of paranoia or of a threat. But everything is told so rigidly that the characters feel like pieces of a metaphor rather than living people.
The child is important, of course, because the film leans heavily on his point of view. But I did not find the emotion there either. The story wants us to feel that passage from childhood into horror, that loss of innocence in the middle of a hostile landscape, but it does so in a way that is too dry. There are moments when anguish should be felt and I only felt that the film was still stretching the same idea.
The atmosphere has a few salvageable things. The empty landscape, the isolated house, the poor light, the wind, the feeling of a suspended world, all of that could have built a very physical kind of terror. There are beautiful images and a clear will to create an oppressive space. But the staging falls short because it repeats the same device too much: wait, look, stay silent, suggest, wait again. In the end, more than unease, it produces fatigue.
The big problem is the beast, or rather the way the film uses the threat. I understand that it wants to keep it in ambiguous territory, but if you are going to show very little, what you do not show has to weigh enormously. Here it does not weigh enough. The threat never becomes truly terrifying, not as a creature, not as a symbol, not as an illness of fear. It is there, lurking, but it never quite justifies so much solemnity.
It also bothered me that it seems afraid of its own genre. A film does not need to be full of cheap scares, but putting on a serious face and hiding almost everything is not enough for horror to work either. Good suggested horror needs precision, internal rhythm, nastiness and an accumulation of unease that keeps growing. Here that accumulation exists, but it is so flat that it feels more like waiting than escalation.
The film is too long for what it tells. Not because it is extremely long, but because the story does not have enough body. It could have been an intense, dry and unpleasant medium-length film, but as a feature it feels stretched. There are scenes that seem placed to reinforce an idea we had already understood a while before. Fear is inherited, the house traps them, the mother deteriorates, the child watches. Fine, but then what?
In the end, it remains for me a very weak, pretentious and boring film. I do not see it as a technical disaster, because it has actors, photography and a certain visual ambition, but none of that makes up for such an empty experience. For me it fails exactly where it most needed to work: in tension, emotion and fear. It wanted to be a sober nightmare and ended up being a slow, dry and quite forgettable mess.
The premise could have had something. An empty space, a trapped family, fear growing from outside and from within, a creature or presence that perhaps represents more than it seems. That kind of minimal horror can work very well when there is atmosphere, characters and a sense of danger that becomes unbearable. The problem is that here everything moves so slowly and with so little energy that the tension never really grabs hold.
The film wants to be serious, solemn and metaphorical all the time. You can feel it in every shot, in every pause, in every stretched silence. But that gravity is not enough to turn a simple story into something powerful. At times it seems more worried about looking important than about scaring, moving or building real suspense. It wants to be folk horror, psychological drama, cruel fable and allegory about fear, but it never manages to make that mixture come alive.
Inma Cuesta is good, because she is an actress with presence and she knows how to convey exhaustion, fragility and despair. But even she is trapped in a film that asks her to repeat the same emotional state again and again. Her character sinks, yes, but the script does not give her enough nuance for that descent to be as striking as it should. You see her suffer, but you do not always care with the necessary force.
Roberto Álamo also brings intensity, although he appears inside a story that does not fully know how to use his conflict either. The family relationship could have been the heart of the film: the father’s fear, the mother’s protection, the child’s gaze, the transmission of paranoia or of a threat. But everything is told so rigidly that the characters feel like pieces of a metaphor rather than living people.
The child is important, of course, because the film leans heavily on his point of view. But I did not find the emotion there either. The story wants us to feel that passage from childhood into horror, that loss of innocence in the middle of a hostile landscape, but it does so in a way that is too dry. There are moments when anguish should be felt and I only felt that the film was still stretching the same idea.
The atmosphere has a few salvageable things. The empty landscape, the isolated house, the poor light, the wind, the feeling of a suspended world, all of that could have built a very physical kind of terror. There are beautiful images and a clear will to create an oppressive space. But the staging falls short because it repeats the same device too much: wait, look, stay silent, suggest, wait again. In the end, more than unease, it produces fatigue.
The big problem is the beast, or rather the way the film uses the threat. I understand that it wants to keep it in ambiguous territory, but if you are going to show very little, what you do not show has to weigh enormously. Here it does not weigh enough. The threat never becomes truly terrifying, not as a creature, not as a symbol, not as an illness of fear. It is there, lurking, but it never quite justifies so much solemnity.
It also bothered me that it seems afraid of its own genre. A film does not need to be full of cheap scares, but putting on a serious face and hiding almost everything is not enough for horror to work either. Good suggested horror needs precision, internal rhythm, nastiness and an accumulation of unease that keeps growing. Here that accumulation exists, but it is so flat that it feels more like waiting than escalation.
The film is too long for what it tells. Not because it is extremely long, but because the story does not have enough body. It could have been an intense, dry and unpleasant medium-length film, but as a feature it feels stretched. There are scenes that seem placed to reinforce an idea we had already understood a while before. Fear is inherited, the house traps them, the mother deteriorates, the child watches. Fine, but then what?
In the end, it remains for me a very weak, pretentious and boring film. I do not see it as a technical disaster, because it has actors, photography and a certain visual ambition, but none of that makes up for such an empty experience. For me it fails exactly where it most needed to work: in tension, emotion and fear. It wanted to be a sober nightmare and ended up being a slow, dry and quite forgettable mess.
Mini Review: I did not like it at all. It seemed to me one of those films that confuse slowness with depth, silence with tension and showing very little with being elegant. I understand what it is trying to do: a dark, almost rural tale, with a mother, a son, an isolated house and a threat that may be real, mental or symbolic. But one thing is suggesting, and another very different thing is spending the whole film hiding the ball until all that remains is...