Luciferina
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Argentinean Gonzalo Calzada directs a visually explosive film where religion, innocence, repressed sexuality and evil spectacularly collide. Natalia is a 19-year-old novice who reluctantly returns home to say goodbye to her dying father. But when she meets up with her sister and her friends, she decides instead to travel the jungle in search of mystical plant. There, instead of pleasure, they find a world of Black Masses, strange pregnancies, bloody deaths and for the nun herself, a sexually violent clash with the Devil himself. (Artsploitation Films)
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A young and pretty nun has the gift of seeing the auras of people, and after her mother's suicide, she returns to her birthplace with her sister and injured father, where an ancient secret is rotting. But none of this is important (auras, father, mother, sister, or a house with secrets), because the film throws away all these motifs in the middle (nothing much happens until then and all of the horror attributes appear only in the form of dreams and delusions ) and moves the other half to a completely different location, where it plays out an occult hallucinogenic ride with the devil, exorcisms, drugs and ritual sex, all of which sounds good, but it's done confusingly and in a dull way (except for the last twenty minutes or so). The film has a confused concept and story with a lot of ambiguity, and it is in fact supposed to be the first part of a planned trilogy, so it is possible that it will come back and explain things in future films, but unfortunately this does not play much of a role when reviewing Luciferina.
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Gonzalo Calzada’s screenwriting work articulates around a bunch of plot motifs and characters, out of which he could pull an interesting horror game. The problem is that, as the story unfolds, all the ingredients sidetrack, weaken or even cancel out, so much so that the film gets deprived of all the excitement. For example, the heroine Natalia is gifted with the ability to tell apart people with a light aura from those with a dark one, but that proves totally useless since, later on, she can’t identify a demon-possessed character because of their equally light aura (whaaat?!). The whole thing is excessively slow and utterly kitsch in its strongest scenes (the exorcism at the end is conducted in a rather awkward manner – this is actually fun). The ending reveals the unthinkable promise of two sequels (again, whaaat?!) that might shed light onto some undeveloped motives of this film. However, I’m not sure I’ll still be interested. And this buffoonish computer-animated kid at the beginning and at the end must be a joke. [Sitges 2018]
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