The film starts in a familiar manner, with a cop (Karra Elejalde) entering the homicide scene of a horribly mutilated six-year-old girl. The victim’s mother (Emma Vilarasau) is reached by phone at her German lover’s home, and has an emotional breakdown when she’s forced to identify the body. A few years later, she is divorced and trying to rebuild her life through work and the support of her friends. Out of the blue, she receives a series of phone calls from her dead daughter, who asks her to go to specific places to pick up clues, and in her desperation, the mother asks for the cop’s help, now retired and a bit of a loner.
Such is the set-up of Jaume Balangueró’s debut film, Los Sin Nombre (The Nameless). Balangueró is nowadays most famous for his [REC] series of “found footage” zombie movies, but Los Sin Nombre already showcases his taste for stylish, shadow-heavy cinematography, stomach-churning situations, and all-around pessimism and gloom. He’s a true neo-Gothic director. Now, when a review starts like this, lauding the filmmaker before analyzing the actual film, negative comments are typically on the way. And that is the case here: Los Sin Nombre might nail the atmosphere, but it’s not really what I’d call a good movie. The characters are barely sketches: the weary cop with an unexplained and sordid past, the grieving mother, the abusive ex-husband and father of the victim, the Hannibal Lecter-like mastermind stuck in an asylum, all of them are stock characters thrown into the mix to say exactly what the plot needs them to say in uninspired ways, despite being played by a solid ensemble of actors. There are too many scenes consisting of creepy characters delivering exposition (and much of this background info might come from Ramsey Campbell’s 1981 novel The Nameless, which I haven’t read), which is interesting for a while, but eventually becomes tiresome and shoddy. The movie builds up a lot of tension towards the end, but rather than reveling in a morbid and no-holds-barred climax, as Balangueró did admirably in [REC], it closes with cheap shock value and an abrupt fade to black.
"Even worse, the film feels at times like someone applying for a job in Hollywood."
Even worse, the film feels at times like someone applying for a job in Hollywood. I’m not referring to its use of genre tropes, which are better employed here than they would be in a hypothetical English-language remake (which would probably include a more unrealistic grieving mother, played by Hillary Swank or Sandra Bullock). Rather, the problem lies in the very fabric of the script. Its depiction of Barcelona’s police department, for instance, could be a little more authentic, as the procedural scenes have a distinctive type of CSI-style bragging that feels out of place in Spain.
Balangueró along with most of his cast and crew are Catalan, but the movie is spoken in neutral Spanish, no doubt with a sharp eye towards the international market. A notable exception is Carlos Lasarte, the veteran Argentinean actor who impersonates the Hannibal Lecter surrogate. He’s a remarkable and fun performer, who pops up again in a wildly different role in [REC] and who looks a bit like a South American version of German actor Udo Kier. Someone trained in Spanish could look at the interrogation scene between him and Emma Vilarasu, and never again have to ask about the difference between Spanish from Spain and Spanish from Argentina.
