After a difficult divorce, Alicia moves into an old house with her daughter Carla, unaware that it hides a tragic history. A blue dress discovered in the attic connects Carla to a girl from the past, triggering terrifying events, and Alicia begins to doubt her own sanity. Their only chance is to flee… but the house won’t let them get away so easily.
Grimmfest says: One of two films screening at this year’s festival directed by versatile Spanish maestro Jacob Santana and starring Belen Rueda, EVIL DRESS is an old school haunted house movie, elegantly retro-styled to look like something made in the 1970s. The colour palette, the careful framing and composition, the soundtrack, the meticulous choreography of certain sequences, such as those within the school, to generate an atmosphere of oppressive disquiet, the overall tone of the film – all hark back to the genre cinema of an earlier age. The narrative tropes, too, are well-established ones: the creepy but well-intentioned religious neighbour who has a history with the house; the formal and forbidding school at which the little girl finds herself bullied and alienated; the mysterious haunted artifact discovered in the attic. There are very specific nods, too, to THE CHANGELING and THE SHINING, while the house itself recalls the one in THE AMITYVILLE HORROR – all the more (deliberately) jarring in a Spanish film. Even just considered purely as an exercise in mood, in the evocation of a particular era of genre cinema, this is really impressive. But as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that something else is going on here; that the version of events we are seeing might not be altogether… objective. It’s almost as if the horror film tropes are a manifestation of something else… The end result is a stunningly visualised, unexpectedly devious bait and switch shocker, luring the viewer in with its seductively old school haunted house scenario, only to pull a sudden, startling perception shift that reveals a far darker, more troubling reality. Anchored by nuanced, complex performances from the great Belén Rueda, and the extraordinary child actor, Vera Centenera, this is both a love letter to a classic period of genre cinema, and a slippery and subversive semi-metacinematic psychodrama that will keep you off balance until the bitter end.