11/10/2023 - Carlota Pereda goes over the top with the ingredients (fire and explosions, plot twists, effects, emphatic music) in her second feature film, starring Spanish scream queen Belén Rueda

Regulars at the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival know that there is a type of film that is constantly repeated in its enormous programme: those that believe they seduce the audience with their incontinent accumulation of cheap scares, sinister presences and plot surprises for absolutely no reason at all. These are films that end up wearing on the audience with their lack of restraint, as if the recipe for their desired success lay in over-doing a feature film that would have gained from simplicity, restraint and synthesis. The Chapel [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Carlota Pereda's second film, unfortunately belongs to this terrible group.

And it’s a pity, because this new work was eagerly anticipated. It comes from the director of one of the best surprises of 2022, Piggy [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Carlota Pereda
film profile], a gore set in a village in Extremadura that made excellent use of the summer heat of this Spanish region (and which won the well-deserved Méliès d’Or at this very festival). With The Chapel, Pereda has shifted the action to the dampest forests of the Basque Country and Navarra, in northern Spain, to recreate a tale of terror based on the age-old tradition of their rich myths and legends.

One of them tells of a girl (suspected of being ill with the plague) who has been trapped in a small chapel in her village, and little Emma (played by Maia Zaitegi) wants to learn how to communicate with her spirit. To do so, she tries to convince Carol (Belén Rueda, Spain’s scream queen with titles such as The Orphanage [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Los ojos de Julia [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and The Body [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], here in her mean girl mode who returns to the village she escaped similar to Charlize Theron in Young Adult), a (fake) medium, to teach her how to talk to ghosts. Her help will be the only way to remain close to her sick mother (Loreto Mauleón) when she dies, gravely ill with cancer.

We are therefore faced with an ambitious artefact that speaks of orphanhood, imperfect motherhood, entrenched traumas and painful childhoods, but from the fantastic genre, something that Juan Antonio Bayona already covered in A Monster Calls [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Juan Antonio Bayona
film profile]. The narrative switches between the past and the present, between suspense and the supernatural, but its script (written by the director with Albert Bertrán Bas and Carmelo Viera) ends up succumbing to an overdose of twists and aspirations, underlined by a mellow and thunderous soundtrack that tries to emphasise the tearful sentimentality of a drama whose interest wanes as the gimmicky excess of its tiresome accumulation of supposedly terrifying elements increases.

The Chapel is a production by Filmax, in co-production with Bixagu Entertainment. Filmax will also oversee its theatrical release in Spain (scheduled for 17 November) and international sales.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)