Veronica

Watched Spain's 2017 Veronica (1:44:47) of which Sister Death (2023) was later created as a prequel. Based on alleged real events that occurred in Madrid in 1991, the story is jumpstarted by three high school girls--Veronica, Rosa, and Diana--who conduct a seance and summon the spirit of Veronica's deceased father. Paranormal phenomena manifest in Veronica's home thereon, affecting not only Veronica but also her mother and three young siblings, Lucia, Irene, and Antonito.

This is a truly suspenseful and well-crafted movie, and is one of the most effective cases about the possible dangers of conducting seances. Like Sister Death, it is slow-paced but gripping. Like Sister Death, too, however, it was written and directed by men, yet portray the few male characters as sexually aggressive (in Sister Death), and (in Veronica) as the absent father, the indifferent partygoers, and the cross-eyed, helpless little boy. One cannot help but wonder how differently the treatment and endings of both movies would have been had women written and directed them. 

One of the great successes of this movie is the convincing performances of the three young children; it is extremely difficult to direct children to act naturally with multiple camera set-ups, with one or two (or more) takes, with artificial lighting, and with a bevy of crew members lurking behind the cameras. Both movies bear the motif of the solar eclipse, yet Veronica tends to contain a hodgepodge of mixed imagery--Viking symbols of protection and, Solomonic seals among them. It is also unclear what Sister Death's role in Veronica really is, and how she came to be reassigned from Valencia to Madrid.