Avoid
Summary
This movie is well set up and has a premise that could be explored in many ways, but its poor lighting and occasionally incomprehensible story mean it fails to deliver.
Plot: Rosario (Emeraude Toubia) waits in her grandmother’s apartment for emergency workers with her grandma’s dead body during a snowstorm.
Review: Horror is one of the few genres that continues to have gems in today’s modern age of filmmaking. Radio Silence, Fede Álvarez, Christopher Landon, Damien Leone and Jordan Peele continue to crank out horror flicks of interest, and you occasionally will stumble over a gem. I was hoping that Rosario would be a case of unearthing one of those hidden gems. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
Let’s start with the good: the premise is interesting. When you have a small group of characters to focus on, the filmmaker has the opportunity to explore more than with a vast ensemble cast, where giving screen time to many characters can be challenging. The movie takes place during a terrible snowstorm where the main character’s estranged grandmother’s dead body is feet away. There are creepy supporting characters. For an imaginative, skilled director or writer, this is a goldmine. You also have David Dastmalchian in the cast – David Dastmalchian is great in everything he does, including this movie. The main character, Rosario, is attractive and personable. Paul Ben-Victor was entertainingly cranky as the super. The makings of an excellent film were all here.
However, the director must have felt that wasn’t enough, as half the movie is in pitch-fucking blackness. I’m not joking. I was like, “A shape is doing something to another shape.” That’s what I saw. When I went back and read the Wikipedia entry about this movie, I noticed a possessed neighbour character that I had completely missed — and no, I wasn’t on my phone at the time, so I had missed something. I pay attention.
Mind you, if I were on my phone, I wouldn’t have been blamed. This was the longest eighty-eight-minute movie I’ve ever seen in my life. There’s a lot of searching in the dark…searching…searching and then seeing weird stuff. Then flashback. Then talking randomly to David Dastmalchian. Then more searching. It’s dull. Really dull. I was so happy when she finally left the apartment, but weird stuff happened for no reason, and she went back, because, you know, what was going on in the apartment had no connection to the bizarre stuff outside.
Oh, and by the way, if you’re ever looking for a weird magic-practicing religion that you’ve never heard of before, search on Google using words that have no context to each other – Google will immediately send you to the right page. That’s what this movie taught me. It also taught me that evil spirits can send you flashbacks of their own life that you would never have witnessed. Because, you know…uh…
The score was nothing to write home about, except it was weirdly frenetic at times when the action on screen didn’t match. It was like, the director realized he made a boring, mediocre movie and was like, “Shit! Well, I’ll spice it up with a soundtrack to make it sound better than it is!” Also, you have the stupid sound cues that now replace scares in some horror movies. Look, a demon is throwing up in my face! Dude, that stuff isn’t scary, it’s just gross…and it’s dark, so I can barely see it anyway! If the music weren’t trying to blow me out of my seat, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
So, yeah, I can’t say to go see Rosario. You can see much better films by much better directors and writers in the genre. I would avoid this one unless scary-looking shapes in the dark that don’t do anything scare you. Then, by all means.