Netflix has done it again. The audiovisual giant has premiered a project in our country that has left all those viewers who have dared to watch it speechless. It is the story of Ramón Gustavo Castillo Gaete, who called himself Antares de la Luz and called himself “God’s messenger on Earth.” Under this title, the man led a sect and committed all kinds of crimes.
The film, which is directed by Santiago Correa and produced by Fábula, narrates the different actions of the members of the group, who firmly believed that the end of the world would come on December 21, 2012. This sect operated in Colliguay, in the near Valparaíso, Chile.
The project has the first-person testimony of Pablo Undurraga, the only former member of the group who speaks openly and with his face uncovered about some of the most macabre episodes they carried out following the Antares belief. The testimony of the aforementioned works as the guiding thread of the story, but it is joined by many other speeches from people who participated in the sect (or who were close to it), but who prefer to preserve anonymity.
In order to develop the film meaningfully and present a concise story to the viewer, the project leaders decided to base it on the book Five Drops of Blood by police investigative journalist Verónica Foxley, who also participates in the documentary as one of its protagonists.
With careful photography, archive images and a series of interviews that try to provide information in a light way, the documentary narrates the entire process related to the case: creation of the sect, recruitment of followers, the transformation of Castillo into Antares, etc. , but it also talks about the penalties imposed on those belonging to the sect, as well as the persecution of all those who tried to flee from Justice.
Viewers of the film were perplexed to discover, through the film, that the sect even sacrificed a newborn child because they believed it was ‘the Antichrist’. As Foxley clarified in an interview, two days after birth, Antares ordered his ‘subjects’ to dig a hole in the ground, where they burned the baby alive.
Despite the harshness of its content, the documentary has obtained good reviews from viewers and experts, since it objectively narrates the events and avoids the media morbidity present in other projects of this style.
