Luciferina

The Sexorcist

Luciferina
2018 Argentina Directed by Gonzalo Calzada
26th August screening at FrightFest 2018

Wow. Well I have to say that, of the five films I saw at this year’s FrightFest, Luciferina was easily the standout movie for me. And that’s saying something, considering I actually got lucky and saw five pretty good movies this time around.

Right from the start of the film, the director states his intentions that Luciferina is the first part of a Three Virgins Trilogy, in much the same way that Universal branded their recent version of The Mummy (reviewed here) as part of their new, probably now aborted, Dark Universe. Indeed, if you stay long enough into the end credits here you will find that the next two intended installments of this series will be called Immaculada and Gotica and… I can only hope this director has more success with these than Universal did with their Dark Universe because, frankly, this film is an absolute blast.

The film starts off with a young woman called Natalia, played amazingly by Sofia Del Tuffo, who is an apprentice nun at a convent and who is the main protagonist of the movie. Right from the start we are clued in to the fact that she is gifted with some kind of ‘special religiously manifested powers’, as she can make here eyeballs go a milky white and see people’s white auras of spiritual goodness when she needs to… presumably to check that they are pure people at heart. Anyway, the plot moves along when she goes home to what’s left of the family unit she rejected when she hears her mother has died in what is being called a suicide. She returns to find her father bandaged up (after being attacked by her mother) and unresponsive, with her angry sister Angela, played by the strikingly good looking Malena Sanchez, at her throat. And Angela’s bunch of short fused friends are not much help to the situation here either but Natalia agrees to go with them to a remote place to take a spiritual, drug fuelled journey to find herself and the dark secret at the heart of what made her father and mother so weird and gruelling to live with in the first place. Pretty much the equivalent of a peyote dream I would guess but, as you would probably suspect from a film in this vein, things go much more wrong than anyone is expecting and it all leads to a confrontation between the forces of darkness and light, culminating in a long scene which is what inspired me to title this review... The Sexorcist.

That’s pretty much all I am going to say about the plot because you need to discover the joys and twists of this movie yourself. Some of them are more obvious than others but everything is so well presented and it’s almost like watching a modern equivalent of something like Alucarda (reviewed here), although it’s not quite the same experience and it’s even more beautiful to look at.

Indeed, alongside the always welcome shots of female nudity which become, by the end, almost essential to the plot in terms of the conflict between good versus evil... where Calzada uses the age old trick of ‘who is on top and dominating’ the sexual positions to show us which side of light and dark are winning the battle at any given moment... we have some very beautiful cinematography incorporating some lovely shot designs which, in this, are very much pitched towards the centre of the screen. It’s not always symmetry the director is after but I would say a good 90% of the film uses either static images or smooth moving camera to make the main focus of the shot hit the middle third of the screen and it’s a technique which works surprisingly well. There are some odd shots which are pitched to the side of the screen and I wasn’t quite sure why he did that in those particular moments given the nature of the design in the majority of the movie. The two I can remember are when Natalia and Angela are sitting on some garden furniture at night and they are the main focus on the right of screen, drawing the eye into the master shot and then, a little later, one of the shots of their boat journey places them on the right of screen too. For the most part, though, the choice seems to skew to placing things front and centre in the composition but it also turns out to be quite a functional thing as well.

For instance, in one of many dream sequences involving a specific location and something scary walking up from behind Natalia, he uses Natalia’s proximity to the screen and the fact that she’s blocking the centre of the shot, to build the sense of tension as a creature gets nearer. Every time she moves to the right of screen to look behind her at the creature, we see it has gotten a bit closer before she returns to her position and blocks the view again. This is repeated a couple more times to obstruct the audience view and leads to the inevitable ‘oh my gosh it’s right there with you’ moment but this was a really cool sequence, even if it was a little predictable and it’s a good example of the cinematography enhancing the film in a very practical way in terms of helping the story along. There’s a scene later in the film which isn’t set in the dream world where, as you kind of know is going to happen, the character finds herself in exactly the same position and situation at the same location she dreamed of (more than once, in fact) and echoes of this earlier scene prickle at the back of the subconscious of the audience because, by this point, the director doesn’t need to repeat that exact moment to the finish to achieve that same tension... he’s already done it so well earlier in the film.

Luciferina is, bearing in mind its remote location in terms of where it places the characters, actually quite gory as well with lots of facial mutilation and death. The writer/director gives us a mentally unstable/villainous character right from the time we meet Angela’s friends... her boyfriend, in fact. It’s the thorough nastiness of him and the moment where he leaves the group of friends with the unvoiced threat of coming back and killing them that’s a nice bit of a set up for something which happens later in the film but... yeah... I really don’t want to give any spoilers away here because it’s such a lovely film and you should discover it for yourself, if you can get the opportunity. I will say, though, that Natalia certainly finds out a lot about her past from a time when she can’t remember and that there are a couple of sequences in this film that might make some viewers think of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 - A Space Odyssey (reviewed here).

So yeah, loads of gory violence, a fair amount of nudity and sex and it’s all supported by a very nice score by... well I don’t know who it’s composed by because the IMDB doesn’t list it. I would love to find out because it’s really well done and I would really like to pick up a CD of this at some point. I knew I was in for something special, in terms of scoring, when the opening Three Virgins Trilogy logo came up and I was treated to a piece of music which sounded, in the first few bars, just like a piece from Jerry Goldsmith’s score for The Omen... and not just because of the strong choral content either. As the film progresses, though, the beauty of the score becomes apparent and it plays so appropriately well with the images that I would love to give this a spin away from the film.

The one, slightly false note in the film comes not from the score but from the last minute or so of the movie. Once character says something and you know it’s only there to set up the idea that there are supposed to be two more sequels and... I think with the strength of the branding on this, it maybe didn’t quite need that. Other than that, though, I can’t stress enough just how great a piece of horror/exploitation movie making Luciferina is... shot through with some absolutely exquisite cinematography and with a central protagonist you really want to root for (Sofia Del Tuffo really does a fantastic job here). Definitely a recommendation from me if you are into horror movies and I just hope it gets a UK release at some point. And I certainly hope those sequels get made sometime soon, too.


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