00:00Whether you certainly can't say that Shudder's Argentinian horror film Crazy Old Lady isn't exactly what it says on the
00:05tin.
00:05Augustina Liendo is driving to see her senile mother Carmen Mora,
00:09and she gets her ex-boyfriend Daniel Henler to look after her mother at her house before she arrives.
00:14But Mora refuses to take her meds, and she knocks out Henler and chains him up,
00:19believing that he is her violent former lover Caesar, beginning a torturous game between them.
00:24So this is produced by J.A. Bayona, who directed movies like The Orphanage and Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom.
00:30Ugh, Fallen Kingdom.
00:32And it's written and directed by Martin Maurerenghi, who previously wrote movies like Argentina 1985.
00:37And you can sum this up very simply.
00:40It's misery with dementia.
00:42Carmen Mora is previously the star of Pedro Amadova's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,
00:46but here she's graduated up to a woman in a psychotic episode,
00:49embracing someone who has lost all inhibitions and restraint on a dark past
00:53that she's kept hidden from even her own family.
00:56It's an outrageously wicked performance, only broken by brief tragic flickers of lucidity,
01:02and the house is a grotesquely gothic representation of her deteriorating mind,
01:06with books stacked everywhere, leaks down the walls, and smoke from burning desserts in the oven.
01:11This is definitely not as sensitive to picture dementia, which is played here for bad-taste laughs.
01:16At first, at least, with an uncomfortable psychosexual tension with who she thinks is her cruel former lover,
01:23and a sadistically seductive game of true or false, with finger-severing consequences.
01:28But don't feel too sorry for Henler, as he first appears accidentally running over her dog,
01:33saying up the gleefully mean-spirited tone.
01:35There's a darkly comic nastiness to this I found quite amusing,
01:39until the movie ratchets that up into something truly disturbing,
01:42which personally went too far for my taste,
01:45and much of the second half left me completely cold.
01:47The problem with Crazy Old Lady is that even at roughly 90 minutes,
01:50it becomes more repetitive than the forgetful title character,
01:53and does feel like it should have been a short.
01:56It's basically a two-hander for the majority of it,
01:58but the attempts to open up the film, including the opening 10-minute driving scene,
02:02and the sequence of the realtor visiting the house, feel more like empty padding.
02:06Maorenghi is more known for political dramas,
02:08and this is clearly using horror as an allegory for Argentina's own bloody history that it's trying to hide,
02:13but those terrible secrets and deeds keep rising to the surface.
02:17But this undercurrent of Sins of the Past isn't developed enough to bring in a depth or substance to the
02:21proceedings,
02:22and the ending lacks emotional impact, landing with a confusingly anticlimactic shrug.
02:27Crazy Old Lady has some shocking moments,
02:30but all of its nastiness felt rather empty when it was over.
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