Today’s movie was chosen randomly[1] for fun, without any particular agenda such as keeping up with a podcast or seeing a movie of the week from November or wherever I left off, sigh. The sigh being about November, not about watching a movie purely just because.

32 Malasaña Street is an address in 1970s Madrid that houses a small apartment building of the type where you own the apartments. And after a spooky prequel scene from 1972 in which a couple of kids try to retrieve a marble and get scared by an old lady in a rocking chair that had, as far as I can tell, literally nothing other than geography to do with the rest of the movie[2], a family consisting of father, mother, older teenaged sister and brother, substantially younger brother, and declining grandfather buy the top floor apartment that has been vacant for some time, at a bit of a steal for the size of it, since there is not yet an elevator on premises.

They’re all bright-eyed for the big city, even mentioning multiple times how they left “the village”. (The teens have regrets, but not the adults.) And they start getting big city jobs and talking about big city opportunities, except that there are some, well, creepy big city noises and things shifting around and puppet shows on the big city TV channel when nobody else is around, and before you know it, it’s the Spanish Poltergeist / Rosemary’s Baby crossover you never knew you should have been asking for.

Other than the teen daughter being a little too open-minded for her “I grew up in a village and also it’s 1976 right now” backstory, this was pretty perfect. Good family tensions, good terrifying ghost, A+ haunting explanation, satisfying conclusion. Unless you hate subtitles, check it out.

[1] Well, it was deepest on my Shudder to-watch list
[2] Well, okay, maybe one thing

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, I haven’t seen enough Argentinian nunsploitation trilogies lately, and I sure do want to get in on the ground floor of a new one! Well, with the caveat that since it’s ground floor, it’s not provable that the whole trilogy will be nunsploitative, of course.

Luciferina is the thoughtful, heartwarming tale of a young nun who has just gone on leave home for a family emergency only to head off into the (Peruvian?) jungle with her sister and [the sister’s] friends to meet a shaman who will lead them in an ayahuasca ceremony to solve all their problems, I guess? Including that the sister has a truly terrible boyfriend, and… well, to be honest, that’s the only one I can remember, besides the whole recent family tragedy. I know that at least two of the friends had problems, but what they were has completely eluded me.

Later, mayhem ensues when maybe drug-fueled hallucinations? maybe drug-fueled acts of violence? maybe the fallen LightBringer himself? result in the kinds of things you’d expect out of a horror movie, with or without the nun angle.

This came out in 2018, so I have no idea when or if the future volumes of the trilogy will appear, nor how nuncentric they will be. Nevertheless, and despite how flippant I’ve been, this was a pretty good movie whose sequels I look forward to.

[1] Who seeks the devil, finds him.