Netflix movie The Wasteland (El Paramo) is a Spanish horror movie that’s also a period movie, and I think that means it’s gonna try to scare us with something that isn’t the internet, which might be a big ask in this day and age. The film is also known as The Beast, which is an even generic-er title, about a thing instead of a place, and specifically a haunting thing that may be a figment of the disturbed mind or may be corporeal, kind of like the internet. OK, so it’s not the cleanest metaphor. I’ll stop trying to wedge any modern symbolic significance in there and just determine if this thing has enough oomph to scare us or not.
The Gist: SPAIN, THE 19TH CENTURY. The war-torn country prompted some of its residents to set up homesteads on the most desolate scraggled plains ever to be home to a lot of twigs jutting from the hard ground like the desiccated limbs of corpses grasping in vain at an empty, gray, uncaring sky. So it’s only a slightly better place to raise a family than the suburbs! Salvador (Roberto Alamo) is the dad, Lucia (Inma Cuesta) is the mom and Diego (Asier Flores) is their boy, who wakes up in the middle of the night so terrified by the creepy figurines his mother carves for him, he drops and shatters his chamber pot. (It was empty, phew.) He wakes his dad who grabs a rifle and escorts the boy through the hovering mist and chilly blue moonlight to the outhouse on the edge of the property so Diego can kegel his hyperboreal pelvic floor muscles and coax terrified dribbles of urine out so he can go back to bed and not sleep much. Poor kid needs a damn hug.
Thankfully, Lucia is a wondermom. She has to be, since Salvador appears to have the emotional demeanor of a brick of old meatballs that’s been in the back of the freezer since 1997. Who can blame him, since they spend their days working a shitty shitty farm where they raise forlorn sheep and anxious bunnies, and yank vegetables from the bloodless, chalky earth, surely the most wretched vegetables ever to provide joyless nutrition, like cabbage and turnips. On the edge of the farm they’ve erected scarecrows that loom like crucifixion crosses, marking an invisible line that shall not be crossed, like, you know, thou shall not encroach upon the territory of the local chupacabras, or whatever.
Salvador wants Diego to club a bunny so they can eat it, but the kid ain’t quite there yet, prompting Lucia to whisk him away so they can play and be lighthearted, thus establishing the dynamic where one parent wants to preserve the child’s innocence as long as possible, and the other wants him to learn the harsh truth of where his dinner comes from. Ol’ Salvador isn’t a terrible person – he’s just depressed. Diego spies on his old man as he cleans the rifle then sees what it feels like to put the barrel beneath his chin. Salvador tells the story of his sister, who was stalked by “the beast,” a tall, skinny humanlike figure with hollow eyes who lurks closer and closer the more you fear it, which drove the poor girl to madness and, eventually, suicide. Nice story, won’t scare the kid at all, you should submit it to Reader’s Digest.
This being one of those One Fateful Day movies, on one fateful day, a gravely injured stranger floats up the nearby mud slop bungwater creek and, before Salvador can fix him up and feed him, the guy grabs the shotgun and deskulls himself in front of the wife and kid. Salvador decides the best thing to do is to find the guy’s family and tell them about his fate, which might be more noble and thoughtful if he wasn’t leaving his own wife and son to fend for themselves against the beast, who hasn’t emerged from the darkness yet, but absolutely has to, because you don’t drop a story like that into a screenplay and then not deliver the goods.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Wasteland has the grim and grueling sub-del Toro horrorisms of many other Spanish-language creepouts (The Influence and The Day of the Lord are a couple of miserable ones on Netflix) crossed with a big choking spoonful of The Babadook.
Performance Worth Watching: Cuesta gives an admirable Penelope Cruz-lite-like performance as a lovely and joyful mother who slowly loses her marbles, as any person living in this brutally indifferent context would do.
Memorable Dialogue: Salvador asserts the movie’s thesis statement when he says of young Diego, “He has to learn to be a man.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: The Wasteland sets up a thoroughly dreary game of Would You Rather: Would you rather there was something out there on the dolorous cinereal weatherbeaten bone-dry merciless f—ing plain, or nothing? Are you more scared of the emptiness that inspires one to contemplate the hopeless void, or the thing that lives in and emerges from that emptiness? Is there a third option? Please let there be a third option.
Note, there is no third option, and possibly only one outcome: Out-and-out psychosis. It’s interesting how the film presents its characters’ hardscrabble existence as so relentless and immovable, then has Mama Lucia lose her grip on that reality; adding in the coming-of-age stuff enriches it somewhat. But the deeper director David Casademunt gets into his premise, the more he trots out the same old cliches: Oppressive atmosphere, crazy folk clawing at their own skin, jump scares, things going thumpity at night, the thing-creature functioning as a metaphor for this and that and misc. etc. It’s grim and humorless and not much fun, and sags in the middle, but for what it’s worth, is also reasonably well-done, tonally consistent and doling out a scare or two. I shrug in its general direction.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Some of its more creepy imagery might haunt you, but The Wasteland us too mediocre to warrant recommendation.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.