In a city ravaged by looting and economic collapse, married couple Esther and Tomás make a desperate choice: to flee with their young daughter to their country house, bought in better days, with hopes of selling it quickly and escaping to a safer country. But their plan unravels overnight. The morning after they arrive, Esther wakes to find Tomás missing—and a stranger standing at the door. What was meant to be the beginning of a new life spirals into a violent nightmare.
Grimmfest says: A punchy, pacey, bone-crunchingly brutal home invasion thriller, with a spiky side order of social media satire, and a powerful pinch of post-Pandemic paranoia, this takes several currently popular genre tropes and plays them off against one another with punishing precision. At heart it’s a riff on a scenario we’ve seen a couple of times before at Grimmfest, in which a violent home invasion is being driven by an internet following of sadistic, bloodthirsty ghouls. But here there is a wider context of financial and societal collapse, and a wave of depression-triggered suicides into the mix, amping up the social commentary, and providing an uncomfortable context for the film’s ruthless and unrelenting psychopathic clickbait killer. She is not strictly an intruder at all. She is there because she has been summoned by the husband’s own self-destructive impulses; a symbolic and literal Angel of Death, determined to fulfil her mission (and keep her “followers” entertained). In which context, the decision to make the film’s antagonist female might be seen partly as a comment on the number of influencers who do seem to be selfish, pathologically entitled young women, in ever more frantic pursuit of followers and “likes”. But this decision pays off, too, in terms of character interaction and narrative, as the two women become cracked mirror images of one another; the desperate young mother battling ever more ferociously for her life and that of her child, and the increasingly frantic killer, gradually realising that her prey is a lot more formidable than she at first appears. Things get very nasty before the end. That bloodthirsty online audience certainly gets what it is paying for.