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All the Moons
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| Year: |
2020
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Director: |
Igor Legarreta
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| Stars: |
Haizea Carneros, Itziar Ituno, Josean Bengoetxea, Zorion Eguileor, Lier Quesada, Elena Uriz, Jean-Michel Sereau, Inigo de la Iglesia
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| Genre: |
Drama, Fantasy |
| Rating: |
  6 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
It is the late nineteenth century, and Spain is suffering through another of its wars which leaves the orphans like these little girls caught in the crossfire. Tonight, they have been trapped as the bombs fall around their orphanage and the nuns take them down to the basement for shelter, insisting that they pray to God Almighty for protection. One girl (Haizea Carneros) wanders away from the group to investigate her surroundings, and as the praying grows louder a bomb hits the building, causing it to collapse on everyone inside. She is the sole person to survive, but at a cost: trapped under the rubble in great pain, she now prays for rescue, and receives it when a figure dressed in a black cloak approaches and decides to help...
That would be the vampire then, for despite nobody mentioning the word this was a vampire movie, and one in the Basque language, unusual for a mainstream effort never mind a horror one, albeit an arthouse item. Igor Legarreta was the man behind this, his most prominent credit before it being pretentious science fiction piece Automata which he penned the screenplay for, and this kind of followed in that tradition, except it was a chiller rather than a futuristic yarn. But was it really a chiller? It was not particularly scary, and with the casting of the youngster Carneros it could pass for a young adult adventure, assuming the target audience for such entertainment was prepared to indulge the arty streak that All the Moons demanded of them.
Names were for mugs here, so the little girl doesn't get one until some way into the action, and we never find out the moniker the helper (Itziar Ituno) uses, in indeed she used one at all; she is simply called "mother" by the child who has no mother, for they are both lonely for a post they each can fill in one another's lives. Or, once Mother has turned our heroine into a vampire, their undeaths. Initially it appears the girl will be part of a ragtag band of outsiders who shun sunlight and drain the blood of the plentiful dying soldiers to put them out of their miseries, but abruptly their hiding place is found and just as the girl was getting used to having a family at last, they are ousted. And executed, with the newest addition only escaping by falling from a cliff - Mother is apparently the latest victim of the living's intolerance for the dead.
There then followed a section which, a title card told us, lasted ten years as the child ekes out an existence draining small animals for their blood in a cave, a pathetic existence that she eventually grows tired of. But this is where it gets interesting, for she builds an immunity to sunlight and after some skin-ripping is able to emerge from the cave and live in the day, though it barely cheers her up any. An episodic quality sets in as she then meets a few people in gradual succession, including a cheese farmer who is lonely, a little boy who is lonely, a priest who is lonely... well, you get the idea, this is about filling the void of life with the company of others, and how difficult that can be. If anything, it owed something to Kirsten Dunst's little girl vampire from the Anne Rice adaptation Interview with the Vampire who also had problems not growing up in a reluctant Peter Pan kind of way, it's against the natural order of things and here will only be overwhelmed with sorrow should it be pursued. Oddly, this theme did not have quite as much substance as you would think, and while Legaretta's visuals were impeccable, it was a bit of a meander, plotwise. Music by Pascal Gaigne.
Aka: Ilargi Guztiak
[All the Moons - A Shudder Original
New Film Premieres 10th February 2022.]
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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