Plagues and pandemics have always been a candy for horror and fantasy film scriptwriters. This trend could only increase after covid, a real pandemic that confined the entire world. Three years later, genre cinema bears the seal of the epidemic and Sitges has awarded it.
When Evil Stalks, by Argentinian Demián Rugna, has won the award for best film in the official section in this intense competition that lasted ten days and screened more than 200 titles. Two brothers who live on a ranch discover that one of their neighbors is intoxicated, that is, that he has a demonic germ inside him. A cleaner arrived at the scene to heal the infected person, but he died dismembered. The evil spreads and takes over the entire area despite the attempts of the two protagonists to stop the gestation of Satan…
Rugna plays with psychological terror (although he does not make ugly a few ax blows and trails of blood) because “there are things that are not seen and that helps the viewer to finish constructing the story and generates terror,” the director explained in a interview with La Vanguardia during this festival.
The special jury prize has also been infected by this pandemic trend. The jury, chaired by the actress Ana Torrent, has awarded this award ex aequo to Vermin: the plague, a film by Sébastien Vanicek, where the spiders take power and force a quarantine to be declared, and to Stopmotion, by Robert Morgan, an exercise psychological horror where a woman borders on madness when she sees how the puppets she works with come to life.
The winners have left out some of the films that were considered favorites, such as the Korean Sleep, by Jason Yu, or the delicious Robot Dreams. by Pablo Berger, who won the audience prize as a consolation.
More controversial have been the acting awards. It seemed that Ernesto Alterio and Víctor Clavijo were destined to compete for the best actor award. Alterio for his interpretation of an unscrupulous businessman in Moscas, by Aritz Moreno, and Clavijo for his role in The Wait, by Francisco Javier Gutiérrez, where he plays the caretaker of a farmhouse in Seville in the 70s that is physically deteriorating. and emotionally tormented by guilt.
But unexpectedly the award went to Karim Leklou, protagonist of Vincent Must Die, by Stéphan Castang, which also has a lot of pandemic: Vincent wakes up one day and discovers that everyone wants to kill him, little by little he He realizes that he is not the only one in this terrible situation.
The seeding, by Barnaby Clay, had gone somewhat unnoticed in this Sitges so, so full of cinema. The film tells of a hiker who, lost in the desert, falls into a tiny valley from which he cannot get out. There, in a cabin, lives a mysterious woman who gives him shelter and very little conversation. She is played by Kate Lyn Sheil, who won the award for best female performance.
There has also been a special mention for Zafreen Zairizal, the young protagonist of Tiger Stripes, a film by Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu, which tells of the isolation to which a girl is subjected after her first period.
The award for best direction went to Baliji, a Congolese director who signed Omen, where a man returns to his home in the Congo with his white, pregnant wife and faces rejection from his family.
The brothers Colin and Cameron Cairnes wrote the script and also directed Late night with the devil, one of the most applauded films of this edition of Sitges. The Cairnes have won the award for best script for this story of a late-night television program at low hours that, without meaning to or eating it, transmits evil to the viewers.
No one has discussed the two special mentions for Moscas, the alleged anti-capitalist by Aritz Moreno, and for Riddle of Fire, by Weston Razzoli, which features very naughty, sometimes bad children, and which the public loved.
Furthermore, the jury awarded the prize for best photography to Le morsure, by Roman de Saint-Blanquat, a vampire and night owl film. Club Zero, by Jessica Hausner, which delves into eating disorders, won the award for best music and The Animal Kingdom, by Thomas Cailley, won the award for best special effects.
