I saw a couple of Spanish films on the weekend that fell into the category of suspense or horror. They shared some similarities, so I thought I'd deal with them together.
"The End" is a thriller about a group of friends who gather at a home in the country, just as "something" starts to happen. All electrical devices and clocks stop. As they struggle to determine what is going on, members of the group start to disappear.
"Painless" is a horror film about a group of children, confined to an orphanage / medical lab during the Spanish Civil war. Their isolation is due to their gift of being impervious to pain. Their history is revealed through the eyes of a doctor in the present day who has a connection to them.
In both cases, the films started with an interesting premise, but failed to achieve the potential of the opening. It didn't seem to me that they thought enough about the implications of the premise and the stories suffered as a result.
"The End" tried to introduce a supernatural element through the character of "The Prophet", a friend of the group who seems to have brought the group together for some unexplained purpose and whose apocalyptic visions are captured in a sketchbook that the protagonist finds at a car crash site. It doesn't seem to perform any specific purpose in the story.
"Painless" tries to try the monstrous aspects of one of the kids to the larger horrors of the civil war, but the reality is that it's been done much better by other films.
By comparison, I saw a film this morning called "Byzantium" that did its homework and largely succeeded. More on that film shortly.
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