A horror writer's childhood nightmares turn real when she returns to her home to visit her dying father.
Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Martín Florio
Starring: Mayra Hermosillo, Rocío de la Mañana, Luis Felipe Tovar
This Uruguayan chiller sees director Martin Florio mash up two distinctly different horror sub-genres. As its title suggests, Insecta is a creature feature centred on a creepy crawly, and a nasty little bugger it is too. But the film's structure couldn't be further from your expectations of a monster movie. The narrative skews closer to a classic gothic mystery than a SyFy channel critter of the week movie, set as it is in a creaky house filled with familial secrets that just happen to involved a six-legged scuttling terror.
A prologue shows a teenage boy revealing a series of scars on his stomach before asking his kid sister to stay up all night and watch over him with a shotgun. The girl falls asleep however, waking the following morning to find her brother hanging from the rafters in a nearby shed on her family's farm.
In the present, the girl has grown up to become Mercedes (Mayra Hermosillo), Latin America's most celebrated author of horror fiction. Among the fan mail delivered by her editor, Mercedes finds a brief letter from her estranged father Jaime (Luis Felipe Tovar) expressing his wish to see his daughter one last time. Mercedes calls home and is informed by Belen (Rocío De La Mañana), the half-sister she has never met, that her father is dying and has only a few days left.
When Mercedes reluctantly returns to the farm where she experienced such horror as a child, she finds her father a shell of himself, mistaking Mercedes for her late brother. Mercedes decides to stick around until the old man croaks, and in doing she reopens old wounds. She is haunted by nightmares of a terrifying insect, along with sexual fantasies involving her half-sister. Mercedes becomes convinced that the insect had something to do with her brother's death, especially as her father's stomach bears identical scars to those sported by her brother.
Insecta is a unique blend of an old-fashioned Du Maurier-esque tale of possible gaslighting and familial conspiracies, and a monster on the loose shocker. Surprisingly, the two distinct flavours go together quite well. Florio wisely keeps the titular terror in the shadows until the finale, mining unsettling scares from brief glimpses of something scurrying across walls and floors behind our heroine.
Belen occupies the classic role of the sinister housekeeper in the old gothic mansion, updated as a very Gen Z character. She appears to want the best for her stepfather, but there are growing hints that she has some wicked plans up her sleeve. That she lives on a diet consisting solely of a yoghurt-like substance said to aid fertility is a red flag, to say the least.
Florio and his crew make the most out of their limited budget and claustrophobic location. The creature appears to be a digital creation but is more convincing than those seen in movies with far greater resources, and Florio knows just how to film it for the most skin-crawling effect. Insecta never quite delivers the explicit scares that would leave a lasting impact, and its resolution is rather predictable, but it's a novel and generally successful exercise in combining two very different types of horror movies.
