SHREW'S NEST (2014 - Spanish)

Studio:       Shudder
Director:    Esteban Roel, Juanfer Andres
Writer:       Juanfer Andres, Sofia Cuenca
Producer:  Alex de la Iglesia, Carolina Bang, Kiko Martinez
Stars:     Macarena Gomez, Nadia de Santiago, Hugo Silva, Luis Tosar, Gracia Olayo, Lucia de la Fuente, Carolina Bang, Silvia Alonso

Review Score:

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Summary:

A young woman discovers that her agoraphobic sister is secretly using their apartment to fulfill a strange obsession with an injured neighbor.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Over narration, the girl recounts how her older sister Montse used to read to her at bedtime when they were children. Although Montse read from the Bible, the girl interpreted the tales as horror stories. The girl recalls Montse being consumed by a heavy sadness that began with their mother’s death, which she was told occurred while giving birth to the girl.

Dona Puri comes to the flat where the two sisters live while also working as seamstresses. While being fitted for a dress, Dona Puri speaks with Montse about her ongoing agoraphobia attacks, for which Dona Puri supplies Montse with morphine. Dona Puri recommends that Montse consult her physician husband about treatment so that she may finally be able to set foot outside her apartment.

Montse acknowledges her sister’s 18th birthday. The girl laments not having any pictures of her with their mother. Montse begins experiencing ongoing visions of their father, initially tormenting her for not visiting her mother’s grave on the anniversary date shared with the girl’s birthday. The sisters tell others that their father disappeared 14 years earlier, and presumably died during the war.

After spying her sister meeting with a boy on the street outside, Montse punishes the girl with a switch. When Montse’s temper flares, the girl clubs her sister with an iron and escapes the apartment. Montse tries following, but her agoraphobia prevents her from leaving. The girl collapses in the hallway just outside their door. Arriving home with his friend Jaime, upstairs neighbor Carlos Cuenca sees the girl and has a blanket placed over her.

In the morning, the sisters reconcile. Montse continues having visions and self-administering Dona Puri’s morphine droplets.

Carlos comes to the door seeking help after falling down the stairs and injuring his leg. Montse brings him inside. When the girl comes home from work that day, Montse instructs her to not let anyone know that she is keeping Carlos there. Montse begins tending to bedridden Carlos on her own, also telling him that a doctor already examined Carlos while he was unconscious.

The girl secretly checks on Carlos. Carlos tells that girl about placing the blanket on her the previous evening and the two of them begin fostering a connection.

Montse starts drugging Carlos’ water with morphine to keep him passive. She later bargains with Dona Puri to acquire an additional supply of the drug in exchange for providing the woman’s niece with a complimentary wedding dress.

Carlos gives Montse his keys and asks her to retrieve some books from upstairs. Montse is inspired to call Dona Puri’s husband, who walks her through the initial steps of conquering her phobia. Montse is able to take one step out of the door before retreating back inside in an exhilarated panic.

Montse explains to her sister what Carlos’ presence means to her. As a romance blooms between Carlos and the girl, the two of them come to realize that Montse lied about having had a doctor visit before prescribing bed rest. They also discover that Montse has convinced herself she is in love with Carlos and has been keeping him drugged with morphine.

The girl notices a group of people looking for Carlos outside the door of his flat. An inspector comes to the apartment asking Montse if she knows Carlos’ whereabouts.

Montse asks Carlos if he feels the same way about her as she does him. Carlos confronts her about keeping him captive and Montse learns that the girl told him about the morphine.

The girl goes up to Carlos’ apartment and meets his fiancée Elisa. The girl learns that Carlos abandoned Elisa on their wedding day and has not been seen since. Upon hearing that Carlos is in the sisters’ apartment downstairs, Elisa leaves the girl in Carlos’ flat and goes to confront Montse. Montse has another vision of her father and ends up beating Elisa to death. Carlos escapes his restraints and limps to the door, but Montse catches him in the act.

The girl returns to her apartment. Montse confesses that their father used to rape her when they were children. She read the girl bedtime stories so that the girl would fall asleep without having to listen to the sounds of sexual assault in the other room. When the girl grew older and their father turned his attention toward her, Montse killed him with rat-poisoned soup and hid his body.

Carlos tells the girl that Elisa was pregnant. The girl sees that Montse stitched Carlos’ leg to the bed to keep him restrained. The girl leaves after promising Carlos that her sister will not beat them.

Dona Puri and her niece arrive for their dress. Dona Puri tells Montse that she gave the morphine to the girl after seeing her in the stairwell on their way in. As Carlos begins screaming from the other room, Dona Puri and her niece discover Elisa’s dismembered torso being used as a wardrobe mannequin. Montse beats Carlos before coming at the two women with a pair of large knitting needles.

The girl returns home. The girl confronts her sister and starts smashing morphine vials as a threat before clubbing Montse and locking her in a bedroom. The girl discovers the horror show of three dead women in the knitting room and then frees Carlos.

Montse breaks free and a fight ensues between her, Carlos, and the girl. The girl manages to stab her sister, but Montse begs for her life to be spared. Montse tells the girl that a picture of the girl with her mother does exist and she hid it with their father’s body. The girl finds the corpse hidden in a concealed crawlspace along with a picture revealing that Montse is actually her mother.

The girl returns to her dying sister/mother and sings a lullaby while cradling her. The girl then drags Carlos outside of the apartment. Carlos mentions that he doesn’t know the girl’s real name. She whispers it to him, they kiss, and the girl leaves Carlos on the hallway floor before going back inside the apartment and closing the door.

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Review:

Since the death of her mother and subsequent disappearance of her father, Montse’s all-consuming sadness has perpetually plagued her in the form of paralyzing agoraphobia.  Her psychological pain has in turn condemned the Spanish seamstress to a life sentence of despondency spent confined in her flat while numbed by a daily dose of self-administered morphine.

Montse’s unnamed younger sister, referred to directly as “honey” or indirectly as “the girl,” shares her sibling’s apartment, but not her emotional afflictions.  As Montse wallows in desperate depression, clinging to hope that Christian prayers might redeem her self-worth, the girl sees her worldview widening with the promise of love, opportunity, and freedom.

On the arrival of the girl’s 18th birthday, Montse is forced to confront the reality that her sister’s presence is not permanent.  Fearful that her isolated environment with a population of two is inching closer to subtracting a denizen, Montse’s mania starts manifesting in the form of haunting visions of a disapproving father, further heightening her eternal anxiety.  So when a serendipitous slip down the stairwell brings an injured neighbor directly to her door, Montse spies a twisted solution to filling the vacancy left by her distancing sister, as well as the one created by the sanity exiting her mind.

Opening on a narrated flashback of bedtime stories told during childhood, “Shrew’s Nest” starts as a seeming “once upon a time” fairy tale of two sisters.  Set in postwar Spain around the 1950s, the movie takes its time unwrapping exposition, focusing firmly on the relationship between Montse and the girl as they spin at their sewing machines, solemnly converse over the breakfast table, or reminisce reverently about a mother hardly known.  The first leg of the film steps forward so softly as to barely be heard, setting the stage for a quiet character study that could classify “Shrew’s Nest” as a slow burn thriller if it weren’t pointing in an altogether opposite direction from what happens next.

Having lulled the audience into expecting a narrow, psychological period piece with only room temperature heat, first-time feature filmmaking team Esteban Roel and Juanfer Andres take off the kid gloves at the act change and send “Shrew’s Nest” careening through bloody bedlam at a breakneck pace.  Following the introspective introduction, Montse’s channeling of her inner Annie Wilkes sets off a snowballing chain of events that has her and her sister scrambling to keep up, with the audience losing its own collective breath right there alongside them.

From Luis Tosar as the menacing specter of Padre to Hugo Silva as the hobbled but charming object of different desires, no supporting player goes unnoticed.  Each cast member is dialed in to delivering the precise mood called for by each scene, whether it be earnest interchanges, dropped-jaw horror, or finely tuned pinches of barely-there dark comedy.

Although “Shrew’s Nest” presents a portrait of a pair, and actress Nadia de Santiago more than holds up her half of the weight as the girl, Macarena Gomez’s marvelous mastery over the complicated character of Montse is the performance stealing the spotlight.  Gomez’s grim pout and tear-welling wide eyes on a soft-featured face draw empathy and sympathy in measures equal to the desire for her misdeeds to meet their comeuppance.  No matter the moment, Gomez embodies psychosis, pity, heartbreak, and demented delirium in singular scenes that uncharacteristically cast Montse as both hero and villain, with the viewer delightedly torn on exactly which layer deserves the most attention.

Contained almost entirely inside a single apartment and its adjacent hallway/stairwell, “Shrew’s Nest” keeps itself compact and tightly focused on serving up a ferociously explosive climax once the plotline kicks into top gear.  Stick with it.  Although bookended by a stuffy ramp up and a telegraphed twist at the conclusion, “Shrew’s Nest” runs full speed at an exhilarating sprint once the tempo turns a corner, justifying the journey to get there as being worth the wait.

NOTE: The film’s Spanish title is “Musaranas.”

Review Score:  80

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