POMO

Atmospheric locations in an abandoned village in the mountains of Calabria are the setting of this film, which shows us what we don’t need to see from the story rather than what we want to see. Not to mention the elements of the plot that are supposed to push the film somewhere but instead dwindle into nothingness. The nude bodies of young forest goddesses crawling out of a hole in a hill are not enough when we don’t know what they are supposed to represent, what the consequences of their presence might be for the humans, or why they ignore some of the humans and eliminate the others. [Sitges FF]

Teenagers finally stopped staring at their phones, instead giving vent to their emotions by screaming, tasting their own blood and pretending to be pack of predatory beasts. In a forest in which a mysterious creature roams and the corpse of their schoolmate occasionally appears. This premise sounds far better than what such a young director managed to make out of it (logically). The girls’ emotions are deeply felt and Summer H. Howell turns in a fine performance, but the motif of her character being overcome with rage after tasting the blood of a dead wild boar leads to nothing, the conflict between the pack of girls and the religious conservatism of the community lead by the local priest isn’t utilized effectively and the murders are pushed so far into the background that we forget about them over the course of the film. [Sitges FF]

For a small, indie thriller about one of today’s most disturbing real issues, A Desert is good. But we’ve already seen the same conflict depicted much more impressively and enjoyably in the fifth episode of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young. The expository build-up before the key twist is better than the execution of the twist itself. The scene that’s supposed to be the most shocking isn’t very shocking at all and the director completely avoids bringing it to a resolution in which the tension would take our breath away. And I’m afraid he avoided it not because he wanted to be original, but because he didn’t know to do it better. [Sitges FF]