User Reviews

This popped up on Netflix as The Wasteland directed by what seems to be first-time-full-length-movie director David Casademunt.

We are introduced to a small family of a father, mother and young boy who lives in a remote house where they live off the land. A series of wooden poles span the perimeter of the farm and we are informed that only death and destruction is outside the perimeter. As the story unfolds snippets are shared about a "Beast" that travels the land. Since it features a hammerless double barrel shotgun that was first invented somewhere around 1880 and jousting by the other equipment that the family uses, I would establish that the time period must the around the turn of that century although it never confirmed or mentioned in the film.

The first 30 minutes of the movie had me spellbound. The cinematography is amazing, the set design is superb and the acting is solid. The movie's start sets a solid foundation and builds tension, setting the viewer up for a fantastic thrill ride.

When the rowboat appeared and the resuscitated traveller pointed towards the wasteland and then proceeded to take his own life out of fear for what is out there, I was on the edge of my seat.

Sadly that is at good as it gets.

From there onwards the story runs out of steam and the unfolding storyline is weak and poorly conceived. The antogonist (Beast) is not shown or introduced into the story until the very end and the story focusses on the psychological breakdown of the mother to such an extent that it hijacks the storyline entirely.

As the story concluded I could not help but to draw parallels with M. Knight's "Signs" - although both are set in completely different periods and countries.

This could have been a little gem of a movie, but sadly the director runs out ideas on how to introduce the antagonist and tell a horror story first and foremost while still maintaining the human drama elements.

A movie about a young boy and his schizophrenic mom running around playing hide and go seek with any little thing that makes a noise. That pretty much sums it up. The film had some good cinematography but not much more. 4 stars.

In "The Waste Land," T. S. Eliot wrote about the brokenness and loss of a country living in near permanent PTSD after WWI. He knew that living in the aftermath of constant fear of annihilation had made a country that would never return to the romantic ideals before the Great War. People would walk and talk, and pretend to do normal things, but that they would never be the same again. The fear would never leave them.

In "The Hollow Men," Eliot extended the metaphor by saying that the survivors were "hollowed out" by fear. They were spiritually and morally empty now, completely defeated by fear. They were the walking dead, living in a purgatory where fear kept them from being alive,

David Casademunt places the characters in "El Páramo" in an actual wasteland. Diego and his parents, Lucia and Salvador live on a farm in an empty, high desert prairie of Teruel, (the only state in Spain so empty and forgotten that it doesn't have a major Highway or railway to get to the state capitol). The parents say they moved to the farm specifically because it is isolated. They hint of a war raging "over there" and say that leaving the farm will only bring death.

Lucia and Salvador act normally with Diego, but it's clear that they are afraid. Lucia tries to protect Diego by playing children's games with him so that he can remain a child as long as possible. Salvador, on the other hand, gives Diego a gun and tries to teach him to take care of himself.

One day Salvador finds a badly injured man in boat, and the family nurses him back to health. However, as soon as he is well enough to communicate, he points to the horizon in terror, and shoots himself in the head.

The audience cannot see what he sees, but we know it looks like a big, hollow man. And, by the end of the film, we know that the big hollow man feeds on fear until he consumes the person. And, in the last frame, we know that the only way to beat the big hollow man is to fight through our own fear. Annihilation will always be there, but as long as we live IN SPITE a of fear, the big, hollow man has no power.

Fear is the virus spread by Salvador's sister. It was born in the pain of child abuse (back to the PTSD) and it spreads like war through the Hollow Man. When the adult gets the virus, every person around him is the enemy (which is why it is likely that Lucia kills Salvador in her madness of shooting anything that moves on the prairie).

There are two other clues about this movie's relationship to Eliot's poetry about fear. The first is in the title. "Paramo" doesn't mean "beast" in Spanish, although that is how the American film distributors translated it. It means "moor," (as in English mood) an area of empty land without trees. There are no trees in the movie because humans have destroyed them. Even as the family depends on them for shelter and heat, they carve the precious resources into meaningless totems. They destroy out of fear the very things the earth has given them for sustenance. Fear makes the family go to war with its own interests, consuming rabbits rather than letting them multiply, simply because Lucia is afraid to go outside.

Second, fear dominates the parents in the film so deeply that they try to inculcate Diego with it. In post WWI, there were no trees, the houses were burned to the ground and the crops destroyed. But, instead of warning their children about the perils of war. Most landscapes looked as they did in the movie. Then in 1939, Germany and Russia caused the horrors to start again, and the fear spread around the world.

This movie is Diego's story. As he refuses to give in to the Hollow Man we see in his eye and chooses instead to find something else, the viewer doesn't know whether he will make it in the Paramo or not. The viewer just knows he will refuse to die of fear the way his mother did. He is, in this way, the hope of young people who have seen the folly of believing in monsters and are trying to do something different. He knows he is marked by the demon, but he is walking away in the one thing that nourishes the paramo, the river. He is choosing the water, and the water is the life,

As a horror movie, ºEl Páramo" is slow moving, but full of grinding tension. It's just okay and overly long (and uncomfortable to Americans like myself who see children put into danger or killed),

As a metaphor using imagery and themes from Eliot's biting poetry about a nation needing to outgrow its scars of war,it is unexpectedly fantastic. That IS exactly the way I pictured the Hollow Men, and that IS exactly how I pictured a "Waste Land," in spite of the poetic references to flowers and tea.

How many times do you watch a crappy Netflix horror movie and find an homage to the greatest poet of the 20th Century? (and, if you don't believe me, go read the two poems).

My rating is for the evocation of Eliot, and I want to see more movies by this writer/director. It isn't often that a Netflix movie causes me to Google and reread Nobel Prize winning poetry.

Also, bravo to Asier Flores, the child actor who was fantastic in this movie.

Simple, yet good production, both visually and sound wise. Bad reviews must be coming from people who expect video-game-like action and constant stimulation. Instead, this movie is focusing on is interesting camera shots, fair acting, especially from the boy, building a suspense by intensifying paranoia fueled behavior of the mother and the "monsters" of a human minds.

Not the best movie, not the worst either. Good enough for a slow Saturday afternoon...lots of dark scenes, so definitely not a daytime watcher.