Criticism of ‘La granny’, the new film by Paco Plaza

Direction: Paco Square Distribution: Almudena Amor, Vera Valdez, Karina Kolokolchykova, Chacha Huang Original title: The grandmother Country: Spain Year: 2021 Release date: 01-28-2022 Gender: Terror Script: Carlos Vermouth Photography: Daniel Fernandez Abello Synopsis: Susana has to leave her life in Paris working as a model to return to Madrid. Her grandmother Pilar (just had a stroke. Years ago, when Susana’s parents died, her grandmother raised her as if she were her own daughter. Susana needs to find someone to take care of Pilar, but what should be just a few days with his grandmother, they will end up becoming a terrifying nightmare.

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In the documentary Friedkin ‘Uncut’ (2018), Ellen Burstyn, star of ‘The Exorcist’ (1973), maintains that the reason for the impact caused by the film is the high level of realism with which it began, long before venturing into the emetic effects. Paco Plaza already hit a similar record in the estimable ‘Verónica’ (2017), which had both verista social cinema and horror. And he reaffirms himself in it with ‘La grandmother’, where terror simmers slowly, calmly, letting everyday life flow naturally: the Parisian fragment, the hospital, the tutorial that teaches how to change an old woman’s diapers…

Plaza, with the complicity of Carlos Vermut in the script, takes care of all the details. Terror is forged through the restlessness that distills the stage (a prodigious control of space) and the progressively sinister figure of the olduntil leading to a final section where the plot unravels, the supernatural turns on and there is still a gap to fit a complex discourse, in a feminine key, about being in time and old age.

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