Aterrados opens intensely and never relents through to the closing frames. This Argentinian film is like a rollercoaster of haunts, melding myriad inspirations into a nice package of well delivered scares. The framework weaves converging paranormal investigations across a neighborhood, with isolated events slowly seeping together. Unique threads and original ideas are presented in this movie but sometimes sacrificing plausibility for spectacle. Explanations are flimsy and backstory nonexistent, but this movie is more interested in delivering fear than reason. Supernatural shenanigans is accepted as a given, and no time is wasted confronting them with both scientific and spiritual approaches. Each scare features excellent buildup and tension, delivering genuinely horrifying imagery and effective shocks. This isn’t a movie reliant on cheap tricks or jump scares but not to say they’re entirely absent. This movie wields an amalgam of effective terror tactics together in a barrage of grotesque imagery and nerve-wracking sequences. The film’s major drawback, aside from the lack of explanation or closure, is a bit of aimlessness in the second and third acts. While the creepy setpieces are excellent, the plot itself seems to lose cohesion and adopt an aura of confusion. While this mimics the strained psychological endurance of the protagonists, this can leave the viewer with little sense of what’s going on, save it’s high octane nightmare fuel.
Aterrados (aka. Terrified 2017)