The 27-year-old Nicolas Pesce makes a very accomplished debut with this macabre horror nightmare in which the killer is a woman – and that’s a gender issue rare enough in horror to deserve pointing out, and throws into perspective her resemblance to Ed Gein, Norman Bates or Dennis Nilsen. The film has some visual echoes of Grant Wood’s painting American Gothic. A young woman, Francisca (played by Kika Magalhaes, and by Olivia Bond as a little girl) has grown up effectively alone on a remote farm somewhere in the US, having been raised – or possibly discovered and adopted in sinister circumstances hinted at in the final act – by a Portuguese woman (Diana Agostini) and an elderly man (Paul Nazak).
The woman dissects cow’s eyes for little Francisca on the kitchen table and they seem to spend long evenings together watching the same episode of the old TV western Bonanza … on video? DVD? Is she just imagining it? However, she is parted from them in horrific circumstances and is now tormented with loneliness. To Francisca, predatory and psychopathic violence comes naturally, but this does not disturb her sense of herself as a fey romantic creature, and the movie’s miasma of evil is made the more disturbing by its air of wan and elegiac melancholy, accentuated by the use of Portuguese fado music. It is beautifully shot in monochrome. Pesce has a real flair for composition, and for generally scaring an audience a very great deal.
