No Spoilers
The Influence is a Spanish horror movie I discovered on Netflix. I don’t mind watching international movies with subtitles because at times I believe the translation is better, but this looked to be a premium Spanish movie with all kinds of accreditation at the beginning so I opted to watch the English dubbed version.
The Influence starts off innocuously enough as any horror movie starts. In this case it’s the daughter, the father, and the female lead, in this case the daughter travelling to visit their bedridden mother who is on the cusp of dying. They all come out to be with the mother in the last days of her life and to be present for the reading of the will, though maybe unwillingly. Of course the family house is a creepy mansion set on what appears to be acres of land.
When the movie starts the intro scenes are beautiful. I can tell by simply by the camera work and all the credits at the beginning of the movie that this was a decently bedgeted movie set to play in the theatres of the country it was made in. I’m going to guess Spain, but of this I am not 100% sure.
We get some slight backstory of witches and we get visions of cult ornaments and occult ritual ram or goat skulls which is probably to start the process of creeping dread. As the family gets settled into the huge house we get glimpses of things that let us know something is not quite right, but at the moment difficult to put a finger on just what that might be. The Influence is a macabre tale of misplaced blame and how the blackest of hates torment, twist and ultimately destroy a family already dealing with issues of depression, distrust and an unloved mother.
Now I realize that’s darker than what I usually write but this tale is a little darker and comes from a society with differing cultural values. I mean underneath we’re all the same but it’s on the outside we’re different, but are we really? The cultural differences aren’t much as they pertain to the movie, I think that may be simply my naivete of Spanish movies so maybe it’s more about the details of what the movie contains.
Check out The Influence if your feeling that you need something dark to brighten your day. In that vein The Influence is a very well made movie and I’m glad I watched it.
The Influence (La Influencia) was directed by Denis Rovira van Boekholt and screenplay written by Michel Gaztambide, Daniel Rissech, and Denis Rovira van Boekholt. Released in 2019 and featuring Manuela Velies, Maggie Civantos, and Alain Hernandez. The Influence (La Influencia) is a horror with an IMDb rating of 4.5.
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