Marrowbone

I don't believe I've ever seen anything quite like it. I highly recommend it.

"Down on your marrowbones and pray!"

A pretty good collection of up-and-comers with a solid enough premise told relatively efficiently, featuring a mix of hardline-by-the-numbers horror and only-mostly-cliche horror, but it lacks that next step to take it over the line into being actually good.

Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole.

Marrowbone is another drama being mismarketed as a horror movie. While I would agree that Marrowbone has some thriller elements, I felt that fear in the horror sense as much as horror felt through dread. Aside from the disappointment upon the realization that the trailers mislead me, Marrowbone is is a very solid film. All of the acting is great (although George MacKay doesn't really portray pain very authentically), the set is both beautiful and haunting, the camera work makes some memorable scenes, and the story is compelling. The Spanish title is The Secret of Marrowbone, which is a much better title. While I wasn't satisfied with the ending they chose and I still have unaddressed plot holes that still bother me, Marrowbone drew me in and I was pleased with the journey.

A good psychological horror movie.

For me, the only good thing about Halloween is the amount of horror movies on television. The Anglo-Saxon reader, don't get me wrong, I know it's a tradition very dear to the Americans and the British, and I respect that, in the same way I respect Dia de Los Muertos. But in my country, this tradition is non-existent. I only started hearing about it fifteen years ago, due to an irresistible alliance between commerce (always interested in selling trinkets and masks left over from Carnival) and the weight of globalization, which turns cultural variety into a homogeneous, tasteless soup. What we have in my country is just the Catholic celebration of All Saints and, the next day, the religious feast of the deceased, with the traditional pilgrimage to the cemeteries. For those who are not Christian or have no one dear in the cemetery, maybe these are days like any other. But let's get down to business!

As you can see, I saw this movie for Halloween, and I really liked what I saw. Despite the presence of Sérgio Sánchez, who signs the script and guarantees impeccable direction, and despite having been filmed and produced in Spain, the film features English-speaking actors and the entire story takes place in the United States. The script begins with the arrival of a mother, with her children, to her family home, which has been closed for a long time. It's clear from the start that they are on the run and hiding from an abusive husband/father left in Europe. Everything goes well until the mother's death, who leaves the children in the care of the eldest. From then on, they try to hide her death until he turns 21, the age from which he will be entitled to be the brothers' legal guardian, thus ensuring that they all remain together.

There's so much more to the script, it's not just a family melodrama about close-knit brothers and the dangers of an abusive father. Terror is very present in the remains of that decrepit house, where...