Occasionally there are some foreign horror films that catch the public consciousness here in the States. Last year it was the Spanish language When Evil Lurks. Another such film is Almamula.  It’s a Spanish-speaking film with subtitles but may not have as much of the horror as you’d expect. As a horror fan, I was disappointed by that. This story and film had a lot of potential but fell short of my very lofty expectations. There were a lot of directorial decisions that were fine, but not great.

Nino (Nicolas Diaz) is a teen boy who lives with his mother Elsa (Maria Soldi), his sister Natalia (Martina Grimaldi), and his father Ernesto (Cali Coronel) in an undisclosed Latino city and country. He has endured bullying and harassment due to his sexual enlightenment. His family decides to move to the country to get him away from the attacks, but he soon finds something else that catches his interest.

This teen boy has a lot of chances to be around girls that are his own age and other kids and men when he goes to work with his father, but he finds out about a local myth about carnal sins. If you sin then the Almamula will take you away. As a devout catholic, he decides to forgo his beliefs and start to do things that his family is highly against. His curiosity draws him further and further into a dark forest which is the place he hopes to find the urban myth in its full glory.

There is an LGBT element to this film. The lead character has sexual urges that he can’t help at the tender age of fourteen. A local handyman is the person who attracts him the most, but his advances aren’t accepted as such. At this age, I wasn’t thinking of these things, but I understand in a country like this one maybe there are boredom sets in. Who knows? This boy has a lot on his mind regarding his family, religion, and those carnal desires I mentioned.  It’s a tough place for any boy in his place to be in. I didn’t envy him.

With this being a film with a tough subject matter to digest there have to be other things that make this movie worth watching. This film has a decent cast from the four main family members to a cleaning lady who lost a son in the forest, to a friend of the mother and the girlfriends of the sister who have sleepovers and lounge around at the pool out back, the cast is fine. It’s the mother played by Maria Soldi that I found interesting. She has many concerns for her son, but she can’t put her finger on why he’s acting up and doing the things he’s doing. She genuinely cares about his well-being. As any mother should about their son. It’s just hard for her to understand him.  Soldi is a surprise to me in this role. She genuinely showed me a lot as this concerned mother.

This movie has a few things about it that elicited a strange reaction from me. First are weird camera angles. The director puts the camera in places where it has to peer through bushes, windows, and reflections from water and other weird camera angles. The other thing that brought a little bit of a scare factor to the story is strange animal noises coming from the dark forest the main character goes into. Add in a score that goes hand in hand with the strange animal noises and you have a few things that give this movie something extra to go along with a good cast.

Almamula aka Carnal Sin is a strange film that takes place in a Latino country and deals with sexual tension and the enlightenment of a teen boy. Everyone he knows has to deal with this boy and his coming of age if you will. It’s not easy on them. The writer/director Jaun Sébastien Torales infuses this film with a lot of strange things. The score and weird animal sounds, as well as odd camera angles, help create a sense of dread. There is an underlying fact that something strange is going on. The cast helps elicit these feelings, but the film as a whole has some pacing issues. It takes a little too long to get to the end. It’s a slow-paced horror/thriller. Which isn’t good. This movie could have been better in that regard, but otherwise, it kept me interested throughout.

Playing April 13th at 8:45 pm at the Oriental Theater

3 stars

Dan Skip Allen