Terrified (2018)
Written By: AC
Edited By: Grave Reviews Staff
Film Information
Director: Demián Rugna
Producers: Fernando Díaz & Andrea Kluger
Writers: Demián Rugna
Date Released: October 11, 2018
Cast:
Maxi Ghione as Comisario Funes
Norberto Gonzalo as Jano Mario
Elvira Onetto as Mora Albreack
George Lewis as Rosenstock
Agustín Rittano as Juan
Rating = 2/5 Graves
***May contain some spoilers***
Synopsis
“Darkness and light. Two realities sharing the same place and time.”
I saw Terrified on a whim as I was exploring the offerings of Shudder, a streaming horror film and television service that began in 2016. Not ten minutes in and I saw one of the most disturbing and hard to watch scenes I’ve ever witnessed. The film is set in a residential suburban neighborhood in Buenos Aires, Argentina where strange and disturbing things are happening. A couple runs over a dog and it comes back to life. A woman named Clara hears voices coming from the sink drain. A man named Walter is tormented at night by a strange figure that lives in his bedroom.
The police get involved when a small child is hit by a bus and rises from his grave four days later. Comisario Funes, an old friend of the child’s mother calls in paranormal investigator Jano Mario to examine the child’s body. While walking around the neighborhood, Jano bumps into Dr. Albreck, who is photographing another house on the block where unexplained things have happened.
Funes, Mario, Albreck, and another investigator, Rosenstock, get permission from residents and decide to split up and stay in three separate houses for the night. They are researching some kind of paranormal phenomenon but don’t explain to Funes or the viewer what they are dealing with. As the night wears on, things quickly unravel as the two realities merge in a bizarre and disturbing way.
Gore Factor
Aside from a particularly brutal opening scene, Terrified has little gore. I can’t say much more without giving anything away, but there a few highly disturbing images that will stay with you after you watch the film.
The Grave Review
Terrified is one of my top five films of the year. It’s really, ridiculously scary. Its weaknesses come from a confusing narrative, inconsistent “rules” for when the two worlds meet, and some mediocre CGI towards the end. I was confused as to why they introduced Rosenstock late in the film when we hadn’t seen him before and didn’t know who he was. Some more backstory on the main characters involved in the climax towards the end would have been helpful.
But all in all, Terrified is a great film and it approaches the genre in an interesting way. It’s also set up in such a way as to make room for sequels in the same universe. It reminds me a bit of Pan’s Labyrinth, in that it plays with the idea of other dimensions existing in parallel with our own.
For the foregoing reasons, Grave Reviews gives Terrified (2018) two graves out of five graves.
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