Veronica: This Woman’s Work

Restraint goes underappreciated in horror, I think. Especially in more modern horror films, though it’s nothing new. Sometimes I get the feeling that filmmakers are afraid that their audience isn’t going to pick up on small, subtle things, and so they go big, with lots of jump scares and loud, broad effects work, jittery editing and a lot of screaming. Sometimes, if you pitch it exactly right, going big and loud can create a certain type of momentum, a sort of headlong rush of energy, but as often as not, it ends up feeling empty and shrill, the cinematic equivalent of those haunted houses that mostly consist of things jumping out at you and going “boo!” There’s something to be said for letting small things do the work, for letting the film breathe a little, for letting things happen without drawing a ton of attention to them.

Veronica works as well as it does, I think, because it has a sense of restraint, relying on careful pacing and inventive visuals to tell its story instead of bombast.

The film begins in 1990s Madrid, with the audio of a police call played over a black screen, intercut with footage of the police arriving at the address. The caller is very young, very afraid, and keeps saying “he’s inside! He’s here!” The police enter an apartment in total disarray and discover something distressing. We hear raspy breathing, and then a smash cut to a title card that says “Three Days Earlier.” Thus, the movie starts off at the end, with something bad happening, with the narrative framed as the events recounted by a detective called to the scene. I don’t usually like flashbacks as a dramatic device, but that’s mostly because when they’re used poorly, they’re completely disconnected from the narrative and just serve to tell us that something bad is happening. And we know that, because we’re watching a horror movie. But because in this case it’s connected to the narrative, it sets us up for everything that comes after. We know it ends badly, but how did it get to that point?

Well, three days earlier, we meet Veronica, a teenaged girl busying herself with getting her younger sisters Lucia and Irene out of bed, then her youngest brother Antoñito. He’s wet the bed again, and it’s just one more thing on top of keeping an eye on her sisters as they try to fix breakfast. She’s got to get the four of them off to school. We get the sense that this is every morning for Veronica. Her father isn’t in the picture anymore for reasons that aren’t immediately apparent, and so her mother works long hours waiting tables as the family’s sole source of income. It’s a big day at school, though – it’s the occasion of a full lunar eclipse, and everyone’s going to watch it.

Well, everyone except Veronica and her friend Rosa, and this girl named Diana that Rosa invited along at the last minute. They’re sneaking off to conduct a séance with a Ouija board Veronica brought from home. See, as it turns out, Veronica’s dad died not too long ago, and she misses him. She wants to talk to him again. Diana’s missing a boyfriend who died in a motorcycle crash, so she wants in too. So the three of them set up the board, make the incantations, put their fingers on the glass, all as the shadow of the moon moves across the sun.

They make contact. And then as the sun is fully eclipsed, it all goes wrong. The glass breaks, Veronica bleeds onto the board, and howls before collapsing into a faint.

Something crossed over. After that, things start getting very weird for her. Unexplained occurrences around the house – lights switching on and off, a malfunctioning electronic game, a backpack that won’t stay put, nightmares, and Antoñito says he’s been talking to Daddy.

This film reminds me a lot of The Babadook, in that there are really two different things going on here. There’s the ostensible paranormal stuff, but then there’s also Veronica, a young woman under tremendous pressure, shouldering responsibilities that she shouldn’t have at her age. Her mom is always working, so it falls to Veronica to effectively raise her three siblings, and, like the mother in The Babadook, she’s trying to cope with the grief around the death of a loved one and just be a regular girl when her circumstances dictate that there’s really no room for either. This could just as easily be a story about how Veronica cracked under the strain of her life as anything else. There’s an especially effective nightmare sequence that gives powerful voice to the resentment she must feel, and after the séance, Rosa and Diana sort of freeze her out socially, creeped out by the events of the séance, which serves to leave Veronica even further isolated from anything like a normal girlhood than she already was. In one sequence, she goes to hunt Rosa and Diana down at a party she was invited to halfheartedly, as an afterthought, and the world the kids at this party inhabit feels miles away from hers.

Like the director’s previous film [REC] (which rules), this is very much a Spanish horror film, in the sense that it’s pretty immersed in Catholic imagery and values – the events leading up to the séance are framed like they’re going to smoke a joint or sneak some booze, setting up flirtation with the occult as just as much of a forbidden vice, which I suppose it would be at the parochial school Veronica and her siblings attend. And the séance itself is framed in terms of pagan forces – there’s a lot of sun and moon imagery throughout the film and it’s noted that Veronica’s fifteen and hasn’t yet started her period, which ties back to the moon as well. There’s even the obligatory creepy blind nun, but here she’s a sympathetic and helpful figure for Veronica. Still creepy, but she owns it with amusement.

And all of this care with detail pays off. Whether or not Veronica actually called something malevolent from the other side or she’s just losing her grip on reality, things get increasingly strange as the film moves on. The scares rely largely on inventive visuals, getting a lot out of little details like shadows on the wall, odd stains, malfunctioning electronics and nightmare sequences that (refreshingly enough) don’t repeat themselves, so you don’t really know when they’re coming. As the film goes on, everything’s just off enough to register a sense of wrongness, but it’s not overly telegraphed. The careful pacing makes good use of stillness and silence – it knows when to give us just a little startle, so when it does ratchet up the scares in the back half, it’s an effective escalation of tension without leaning on jump-scares to do the work. The cinematography moves a lot between very bright and very dark spaces – the basement where the séance is conducted and the family’s apartment at night are warrens of half-lit things that could be monsters or not, and light is often just this side of being uncomfortably bright, with lots of lens flare, making it feel almost intrusive in spots, and making Veronica’s few glimpses of life outside of her increasing paranoia seem almost alien. The whole thing is scored with John Carpenter-esque synthesizer and songs by a popular Spanish rock band that Veronica listens to, making it feel both a little timeless and also further centering it on Veronica’s experience as a girl dealing with all kinds of things she shouldn’t have to, supernatural or otherwise. It’s a carefully constructed, tense film that never collapses into melodrama, and that restraint makes it work.

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