A young woman returns to the hometown she previously fled following her friend's ritualistic murder.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Emilia Cotella, John Mathis
Starring: Clara Kovacic, Bianca Mitnik, Andres Malakkian, Antonio Kassab, Valeria Beltramo
"Don't take drugs kids!" That's the message of Argentinian horror The Devil Whispered My Name, which sees a night on the Ayahuasca lead to an ongoing nightmare for the teens involved, one that follows them into adulthood. Having met while studying Film in London, Emilia Cotella and John Mathis have combined to co-direct this slick but insubstantial shocker set in a scenic but spooky corner of rural Argentina.
It's there that we find young Carla (Bianca Mitnik) and her friends throwing a celebration, having graduated from school. Carla is set to head to the big smoke of Buenos Aires and follow her dreams of becoming a dancer, while her best friend Maria (Mia Cavo) prefers to remain in her home town and raise the child she's carrying with her boyfriend. Rather than the usual night of drinking warm beer from dixie cups, Carla and friends decide it might be fun to have an Ayahuasca ceremony, which takes a dark turn when Maria seems to kill herself while under its influence.
10 years later Carla (now played by Argentine horror regular Clara Kovacic) has a successful ballet career in Buenos Aires, but she's still haunted by the horrors of that fateful night. Carla regularly experiences horrific visions of Maria's reanimated bloodied corpse. Cotella and Mathis do something clever with this well-worn trope: they stage these moments like traditional jump scares, but while the audience jumps, Carla barely flinches. It's a nice way of telling us wordlessly that Carla has been living like this for so long that she simply takes it for granted at this point.
One vision does upset Carla however - that of her childhood friend and fellow Ayahuasca adventurer Eduardo, hanging from a noose. Carla is almost unsurprised when she receives a phone call from her old friend Daniel (Antonio Kassab), informing her that Eduardo has taken his life. Carla reluctantly returns home for the first time in a decade to attend the funeral. There she reconciles with Maria's mother Ruth (Valeria Beltramo), which brings her some much needed comfort and closure. But when Carla begins having a new set of terrifying visions involving the local townsfolk, it becomes clear that some evil force in the town is determined to claim Carla and the other survivors of the Ayahuasca ceremony.
The concept of someone travelling to an eerie town and finding themselves trapped within by sinister forces has produced some horror classics like Messiah of Evil and City of the Dead. There's something inherently creepy about a normally cosy town suddenly becoming possessed by evil, the once friendly locals turning menacing in their bloodlust. The Devil Whispered My Name cruises on this ingrained atmosphere to a point, but it eventually reveals itself lacking in original ideas.
The low budget means much of the film involves conversations between two or more people in rooms and cars as they trash out ideas as to how they might escape this predicament. There's a vagueness regarding the mythology at play here, though perhaps Argentinian audiences might pick up on something my European eyes missed. If there's a reason provided for why the apparent curse remains stuck in the town rather than following Clara to the capital, it went over my head. Kovacic is convincingly terrified, but it would be nice if we knew exactly what sort of evil her protagonist is contending with here.
