 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Legions • Year: 2022 • Country: Argentina • Director: Fabián Forte • Main cast: Germán de Silva, Lorena Vega, Mariana Anghileri, Marta Haller • Runtime: 88 minutes • Production company: Coruya Cine, MonteCine • TRAILER
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The ones who reached out for the movie Legions (2022), a group in which I must include myself, expecting some kind of over-the-top horror comedy in the style of The Evil Dead (1981), as it has been promoted by the distributors, might get slightly disappointed when watching the film and realizing there is a little to none comedic elements in the movie. Yes, some moments can be found a little silly or sympathetic, as the members of the mental institution where the main character is locked in are attempting to rehearse a theater play involving all kinds of chaos and unprofessionalism, but that is very much it. And that is just something that is part of the story, not a chosen tone for the production.
Because if we have to find a subgenre to describe a movie like Legions (2022) it must be Folk horror. The movie starts with the story told by a shaman since his young years living in the Argentinian jungle where he finds in love with a woman and inbreeds a child, but a demon destroys his family. Then, set in the current times, the shaman is an old man locked for his crazy supernatural stories in the mental institution and his daughter is a grown-up woman working for a big firm and living a normal life away from all the superstitions and magical world from her ancestors.
The main theme of the movie is the loss of that cultural ancestry, the fight of a father to win back the love of his estranged daughter in a modern world he doesn’t really understand, and how we fear being called crazy and not fit in a society when we admit our believes that differ the institutionalized ones. Of course, taken a little to the extreme, because to have some possessed dude locked in a room of your apartment to perform weird gory exorcisms, as the poor protagonist man does, might be a little bit too wild.
The tempo of the movie is pretty boring, and the dark cinematography and tone of the stories won’t get the feeling of anguish to the audience that might be expected. The writer and director Fabián Forte fails to build the mood for the film with over-developed conversations that take nowhere and when the time for the final climax against the demonic entity arrives we have lost interest in what is on the screen. The screenplay has a lot of waffle and lacks a deeper building of the background story and the origins of the demon, and it all looks a little bit too forced to flow easily. The main actor Germán de Silva’s performance feels too passive, and although the supporting actresses Mariana Anghileri and Lorena Vega imprint some intensity on their characters the performances are generally tedious.
Although, at first, it might look like one of those little international titles that could result in a glad surprise in the horror genre, Legions (2022) doesn’t outstand as a must-watch picture, resulting in a superficial film that might bring a little bit of entertainment, overall, is an easy to forget experience.
RATE: 5/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt23555256
