Heathbulich’s review published on Letterboxd:
Learned Fear of all
Final Project Response
This film starts with a common theme used a lot lately, dystopian, but I feel it’s the Spanish concept of a dystopian time. It’s such a great film as it is not a dystopian future but a different time yet reframed as a doomed existence for most. I think the father is a very bold man who has been conditioned not to feel or express much emotion, which he is trying to teach the boy. The reason for these lessons is that the world they are bringing Diego up in is perceived to be dangerous and deadly.
I love how the father sets up the premise of the beast feeding on fear which I feel is him trying to toughen the boy up after the rabbit incident and the fact that the mother coddles Diego. But, then, he builds upon the story by making it even more realistic by relating it to his own family, telling the story of his sister seeing the beast and ultimately dying instead of facing her fears and family trauma.
After Diego’s father is in the upstairs putting a gun to his head, which I do not think Diego perceives as what it is, the film starts to pick up. After the suicide in front of the family, I feel this gives the father the out he has been looking for. I think the father has been depressed and wants something different out of life. His marriage seemed to have lost its luster, and his son had started to be a disappointment after all the coddling.
The psychological aspects of the film start to take hold, and their fear and isolation begin to take their toll. The isolation, anxiety, and depression make everything seem to spiral out of control. The mother shoots at things that are not there and begins to make her own reality. She begins to make the house their isolation prison as fear grows, and so does the monster feeding on all the anxiety.
I love how ironic the movie gets as the mother goes from coddling the boy to forcing him to mature as his father was trying to do to him all along. Making him mature, but fear engrosses everything they do and affects everything down to hygiene. So in closing, this film is a classic psychological fear-driven dystopian piece of cinema that embodies how much isolation and fear can affect society because if this concept didn’t frighten us, isolationism and fear, we wouldn’t think it was horror, just a thriller. It ends with the classic boy facing his fears and overcoming them leaving the safety of the house and the pots his father put up to face the future alone with courage and without fear.