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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
There is a moment, halfway through Alas Abiertas, when the camera lingers on a frayed spool of thread the color of arterial blood. The reel spins, unmanned, as if the house itself were sewing its own shroud. In that hush you realize director Agustín Carrillo de Albornoz—also playing the haunted patriarch—hasn’t merely resurrected the Southern Gothic tropes of Carmen of the Klondike or the whispered cruelty in Sir Arne’s Treasure; he has distilled them into a volatile perfume, spritzed onto the wrists of a child who can’t stop sniffing the past.
Carrillo de Albornoz the auteur slices open the idea that family lore is inherited like heirlooms; instead, it festers like humidity, warping floorboards of identity. Young Cielo (a feral-luminous Catalina D’Erzell) does not stumble upon her clan’s skeletons—she inhales them. The ledger she unearths beneath a pile of moth-chewed stoles is written in three inks: iron-gall black, Revolutionary crimson, and a post-Transition blue that fades when exposed to moonlight. Each chromatic shift signals a different regime of forgetting, and the film’s palette mirrors that triad: bruised indigos for Francoist nights, volcanic vermilons for the transgressive 1980s, and anaemic ceruleans for today’s anaesthetized democracy.
What follows is not a scavenger hunt but a séance. Cielo’s grandmother Ánimas (Carmen Bonifant, all gravel-and-honey voice) once costumed the great flamenco troupes; now she tailors wings for a granddaughter who might outfly the family curse. Every stitch is a confession without absolution. Watch how Bonifant’s fingers tremble when she measures the span between Cielo’s shoulder blades—she is not calculating fabric but the exact distance between innocence and damnation.
The supporting ensemble arrives like displaced tarot figures. Enrique Cantalaúba’s clockmaker, whose left eye sees only the past, winds broken cuckoo clocks so they chime in reverse—time flowing backwards into the womb. Carlota Santugini’s novice, belly swollen with cryptic twins, recites the Dies Irae while scrubbing blood from the convent tiles, convinced each stroke erases a mortal sin. And Luis Ross’s marquis, bankrupt yet resplendent in moth-eaten brocade, trains albino peacocks to fan their wings on command; the birds become living epiphanies of whitewashed guilt. They converge nightly in an olive mill converted into a clandestine theatre, where puppets carved from graveyard boxwood reenact the unspeakable. The audience? Civil-war ghosts who pay in forgetting.
Cinematographer Enzo Viola shoots these séances in chiaroscuro so tactile you can almost taste the rust on the machinery. Shadows stretch like pulled taffy; lantern-light carves the children’s faces into ivory cameos. Compare this to the oppressive whiteness of Frou Frou or the Expressionist angles of Eerie Tales—here darkness is not absence but over-presence, a velvet fungus colonizing memory.
Composer Elvira Ortiz abandons flamenco clichés, opting for a score built from processed field recordings: the creak of a corset, the hiss of a candle extinguished by guilty breath, the brittle clack of castanets slowed to whale-song tempo. These sounds percolate beneath dialogue until human speech itself becomes another instrument—especially when Cielo starts speaking in the plural (“we were born,” “we remember”) as though channeling every silenced ancestor.
Listen for the moment the wings are finally unfurled: a low sub-bass drone mimics tectonic plates grinding beneath Andalusia, while a child’s distant laughter loops into a Gregorian chant. The effect is both ecstasy and abjection—the sacred and the septic sharing a single marrow.
Catalina D’Erzell never acts; she haunts. Her Cielo has the translucent skin of someone who has never been touched by certainty. When she finally tries on the wings, her shoulder blades jut like nascent horns—an angel become demon, or vice versa. Watch her pupils dilate as the feathers brush the ceiling beams: terror and rapture fuse into a single expression that feels illegal to witness.
Opposite her, Carmen Bonifant radiates the exhausted glamour of a retired cantaora who traded duende for survival. In a late-film monologue delivered to a cracked dressing-room mirror, she recounts how she once embroidered a traje de flamenca with human hair smuggled from a prison camp. The camera holds on her reflection and the real her in profile, creating a double image that splits, blurs, reunites—an epitome of the film’s obsession with selves that refuse to stay stitched.
Where The Spirit of the Conqueror glorifies ancestral might and The Silver King seeks restitution through heirlooms, Alas Abiertas insists that heritage is a predatory loan. Its true cinematic kin are the toxic pastorals of Sheba and the suffocating domesticity in Ghosts, yet none reach the ferocity with which this film demands that viewers eat their own nostalgia raw.
Some will read the wings as a metaphor for Spain’s decades-long escape from historical accountability; others will see a queer refusal of reproductive futurity—Cielo’s final act severs the bloodline rather than continues it. The genius lies in the refusal to land on either interpretation. When the wings are ultimately set alight, the smoke writes contradictory slogans across the dawn: Never forget and Never remember. The ashes fall like grey snow on the peacocks, turning their immaculate plumage into a mottled testimony that no archive can sanitize.
There are films you watch; Alas Abiertas is a film that watches you back. Long after the credits, you will find crimson threads on your clothes, smell olive-mill must in your dreams, and catch your own reflection splitting in two. It is the most devastating cinematic exorcism of 2025—equal parts lullaby and autopsy. Do not enter expecting the cathartic release of Day at the Park or the heroic redemption of On the Belgian Battlefield. Here, the best you can hope for is to emerge wing-scarred, throat raw from singing the songs no one taught you, yet somehow you remember every word.
Grade: A+ — a bruise that refuses to fade.
IMDb 7
1921
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