Laura and spirits – Newspaper Kommersant No. 11 (7456) of 01/21/2023

Starting as a standard horror film on a well-deserved and long-time favorite theme of horror makers, Spanish director Jacobo Martinez’s 13 Exorcisms unexpectedly turns into a social drama. However, this transition was not very elegant for the director, who debuted in feature films, he believes. Yulia Shagelman.

The opening credits report that exorcisms are still being performed in Spain in the 21st century. The picture is based on a true story that took place in Burgos ten years ago. The parents of an underage girl with psychiatric problems believed that she was possessed by the devil, and subjected her to as many as thirteen rituals in a row, involving several priests, a theologian who acted as a consultant, and with the consent of the leadership of the local diocese. Uncles and aunts, having learned about this, tried to stop them and even sued, but he did not satisfy the claim, and everything ended rather sadly.

The main character of the film, 17-year-old Laura (Maria Romanillos), grows up in a family with a deeply religious and very strict mother (Ruth Diaz), who forbids her to go to parties and meet boys, and a gentle father (Urco Olazábal), who does not dare in anything argue with his wife. They also have a disabled son (Pablo Revuelta) and used to have another, but he drowned at the age of eight. This tragedy fully explains Laura’s mother’s religious fanaticism, which has become a consolation for her, and her overprotectiveness over her daughter, although her methods of “education” still resemble a similar parent from Stevenking’s “Carrie”.

On Halloween night, Laura sneaks out of the house to go to the disco with her friend (Alicia Falco). But instead, she leads her to an abandoned apartment in an old house, where two classmates are waiting for them. This apartment, of course, is not good: according to an urban legend, a certain doctor lived here who killed his wife and daughters, and in his defense he referred to the fact that the devil had taken possession of his soul. While a friend is hiding in another room with one of the guys, Laura is taking a crash course in teenage initiation with another: the first drink, the first kiss, the first intimate touch. Then someone comes up with a bright idea to arrange a séance and evoke the spirit of a killer doctor, and now Laura is rushing around the apartment and screaming terribly, covering her face with her hair, that your Samara from The Call.

The girlfriend still manages to catch her and bring her home, where her mother makes a scandal and cuts Laura’s hair as punishment. The next day, the girl begins to behave strangely: she hears strange noises, it seems to her that someone is watching her, and bloody inscriptions “whore” and “slut” appear on her hands. Either these are hallucinations caused by guilt, which the catechism lessons and motherly moralizing have grown in her, or the devilish forces really lurked in the doctor’s apartment, and now they are haunting Laura. Attempts by the school psychologist (Silma Lopez) to understand what is happening to the girl and explain to her that she did not deserve the hellish curse in any way lead to nothing.

Parents, on the other hand, are horrified by all this, especially when their daughter is tearing up her long black hair before their eyes, or doctors remove the crosses that got there from no one knows how. On the advice of a pious neighbor with the appropriate name Asunción, that is, the Ascension (Christina Castaño), they decide to exorcise the devil from their daughter, and this must be done by a specially trained priest (Spanish cinema veteran José Sacristan). He zealously gets down to business, and a typical set of body-breaking convulsions, terrible wheezing, rolling eyes, trembling candle flames and the like unfolds on the screen, while the psychologist tries to stop this madness. The director manages to keep the viewer in doubt until the very end: is everything that is happening real or is it an example of collective insanity, but the really bloody finale of the picture, taken from life, turns out to be even too unambiguous.