so, that s one strand of the story. in another strand, cruz s character is trying to excavate a mass grave in her hometown from the civil war, so there are two stories. parallel mothers, parallel stories, personal and political, which sounds like a fascinating combination. if you think of the films of guillermo del toro, like the devil s backbone or pan s labyrinth, he s managed to do exactly that with the spanish civil war. it beautifully designed and beautifully played and a well written script with great performances and a wonderful score. and it sounds like a perfect match. the problem for me if it is not so much parallel stories, it is tangential stories.
in another strand, penelope cruz s character is trying to excavate a mass grave in her hometown from the civil war, so there are two stories. parallel mothers, parallel stories, personal and political, which sounds like a really fascinating combination. and if you think of the films of guillermo del toro, like the devil s backbone or pan s labyrinth, he s managed to do exactly that with the spanish civil war. here s the thing with this, it s beautifully designed, beautifully played a very well written script with great performances, wonderful score. and it sounds like a perfect match. the problem for me is that it s not so much parallel stories, it s tangential stories. you have the spanish civil war story, which kind of appears and then gets sidelined. you have the personal story, which is full of melodramatic contrivance which you re kind of meant to buy into because, hey, it serves the story. and then we move back to the spanish civil war
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you get a sense from that of the sort of sombre creepy tone of it. i want and it s a film about which is about social problems, domestic abuse, poverty. 0n the other hand it s a fantasy film. if you think of the devil s backbone which this makes specific reference to, it does nothing about melding reality and fantasy. i think this is only partly successful. there are some bits in it that are like creature feature like pumpkin head. there are other things in it that are really about the grim, gritty reality of life. and i don t think they fully got the parts to match up with that, but i do think it s interesting to see somebody trying to tell an important story through the horror of fantasy genre. i think the problem with it is, i mean, it s halloween, people go to movies for scares, if you re looking forjump scares it doesn t really have that many of them. if you re looking for something that is flat social commentary it got too much fantasy.