A family has learned to live with the spirits that haunt their funeral
home, but a disturbing new presence has arrived.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Mauro Iván Ojeda
Starring: Luis Machín, Celeste Gerez, Camila Vaccarini, Susana Varela, Hugo
Arana
The idea of working in a funeral home is enough to creep most of us out,
but what if you also lived on the premises? Going to sleep every night
knowing there are fresh corpses below your bedroom? Nope, not for me. As
macabre as it seems, this is the norm for the families of undertakers across
the world, and I guess they just become numb to the idea of sharing their
home and workplace with the recently dead.
Bernardo (Luis Machín), the patriarchal protagonist of
writer/director Mauro Iván Ojeda's Argentine chiller
The Funeral Home, has been an undertaker so long that he no longer bats an eyelid at his
unconventional home and work scenario. That's not so much the case for his
wife Estela (Celeste Gerez) and his teenage stepdaughter Irina (Camila Vaccarini) however. Sure, they've become accustomed to the corpses, but this funeral
home has another issue - the bodies don't stay dead!
The mortuary and accompanying family home is haunted by multiple spirits,
but thanks to the help of a local indigenous shaman (Susana Varela),
Bernardo and his family have come to an agreement with the spooks, who have
agreed to stay outside the home, save for the indoor bathroom (don't ask!).
This pact appears to be broken when Irina spots a ghost in her bedroom - it
seems one spook in particular had had enough with the rules.
The Funeral Home opens with a couple of effectively
Spielbergian sequences. The credits appear over a scene in which we track
around the family home, in similar fashion to the opening of
Poltergeist, and when the ghosts first arrive at night it's in the manner of
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, all spectral light blasting under doors and through keyholes. It seems we
might be in for a visually compelling horror treat!
Sadly, that promise quickly erodes as The Funeral Home gets
bogged down in some decidedly ham-fisted storytelling. There are various
backstories doled out in awkward fashion, with characters keeping secrets
from one another. But the way Ojeda fills us in on these revelations is
poorly thought out, and we're often left scratching our heads because we
require info we haven't been made privy to at that point for the scene to
have any effect on us. Had Ojeda told us upfront exactly what's going on
here, Hitchcock style, it would have made his film a lot more
suspenseful.
It's a shame that the writing is so poor, as all other aspects of
The Funeral Home are technically impressive. In spite of the
creaky dialogue it's got believable performances from its small cast, and
it's a handsomely mounted film that gets good value out of a single
location. But after that arresting opening, we're left to endure a poorly
plotted bore, and ultimately the film is as devoid of life as one of
Bernardo's clients.
