Criticism of ‘Tin & Tina’, religious terror with Milena Smit and Jaime Lorente

“Cruelty is an entirely natural thing in the childish character; in effect, the inhibition by virtue of which the drive to seize stops before the pain of the other, the ability to sympathize, develop relatively late” Freud reflected in ´Three Essays on Sexual Theory´ (1905), as if trying to establish a weighty cultural alibi for so many films that would address the theme of the evil of children, almost always related to erotic awakening (and, therefore, connected with the works of Carroll, Bataille or Cocteau), from then to the present day. From “The Bad Seed” (LeRoy, 1956) to “The Other” (Mulligan, 1972). From Wolf Rilla and John Carpenter (‘The Town of the Damned’) to Stephen King (‘The Children of the Corn’). Without detracting from Damien or cult titles as succulent as ‘The Girl’ (1977) or ‘Deadly Embrace’ (1980), even more recent works such as ‘The Good Son’ (1993), ‘The Orphan’ (2009) or ‘ The son´ (2019). The same universal cruelty that feeds this remarkable, unexpectedly solid and, at the same time, refreshing first feature from short filmmaker Rubin Steinalthough its intrinsically Spanish character gives it some particular characteristics in form and substance.

Those crazy little ones

The filmmaker places his macabre story, rich in black humor of pata negra, in the development era of this country of all demons. Here religion (as a force that inhibits the sexual drive, going back to Freud) and nostalgia play a major role. ´Tin & Tina´ would then connect with a title as obscure as ´The face of death´ (Alfred Sole, 1976), also an original source of the inferior and almost parallel ´La niña de la comunion´ (Víctor García, 2022). In the field of memory, the shadow of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador seems evident, not only the author of the immortal ´Who can kill a child?´ (1976) but also the most popular and television author, the person in charge of ´Historias para no sleep’, ‘My favorite terrors’ and even ‘One, two, three, answer again’, which in the film function as a gimmicks of generational complicity. By stripping his reference so much, there will be those who blame the director for joining the Paco Plaza club, especially that of ´Cuento de Navidad´ (2005) and ´Verónica´ (2017), when Stein shows himself above all as a continuist with his label own, interested in the most disturbing historical memory. Still, the similarities are obvious. Beyond the shadow of the great Chicho (who would have enjoyed this film a lot), the presence of Teresa Rabal would work here like that of Ana Torrent in ´Verónica´ and the ´Super Disco Chino´ by Enrique and Ana as the hits by Héroes del silencio and the spot by Centella in ´Verónica´, Estopa and Vainica Doble in ´La abuela´ (2021) or the ´Yes, Sir, I can boogie´ by Baccara in the aforementioned ´Cuento de Navidad´. But Ibáñez Serrador is not the only Spanish fant-terror director to whom the film pays respectful homage; he also likes to see himself in the work of the sad and recently deceased Eugenio Martín. There is that pitch-black story about motherhood that is ´That house on the outskirts´ (1980) and, of course, the hilarious ´A candle for the devil´ (1973): the Tin and Tina of the title have nothing to envy the spinsters played by Aurora Bautista and Esperanza Roy in that dusty masterpiece of autochthonous horror, with its obsession with doing Evil in the name of Good (and the canonical codes of the genre according to the sacred verses of the deepest of the Spains).

We are, what less, before an exordium as well concocted as it is gracefully cooked, of which it is necessary to highlight the dazzling presence of a Milena Smit who debuts with flying colors in the homeland school of scream queens. The film, playful and disturbing in equal parts in its first half, only loses some steam in a long denouement that falls into the anticlimactic a couple of times: the social message about the gaslighting The character of a Jaime Llorente who is too attached to the tics of the television Angel Christ does not quite match the tone, and the pre-closing sequence shot errs on the side of exhibitionism. Peccadillo in any case: Fun is assured.

For fans of the best humor / perverse and pure horror

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DATA SHEET

Address: rubin stein Distribution: Milena Smit, Jaime Lorente, Carlos González Morollón, Anastasia Achikhmina. Country: Spain Year: 2023 Release date: 31–3-2023 Gender: horror thriller Script: rubin stein Duration: 119 min.

Synopsis: When Lola loses the babies she was expecting, she also loses her faith in God. Hoping to get her back, she goes with her husband Adolfo to a nunnery where they meet Tin and Tina, two angelic seven-year-old brothers to whom Lola feels strangely attracted.