Venus (2022)

Warning: there will be last act spoilers!

Lucía (Ester Expósito), a dancer in a techno club run by organized crime, absconds with a large bag full of little blue pills that belong to her employers. On her way out with her loot, she manages to get through an altercation with the chief bouncer alive. She is however injured enough she flees to her estranged sister Rocío (Ángela Cremonte) instead wherever she was initially planning to run to.

Rocío lives with her daughter Alba (Inés Fernández) in a run-down, nearly empty apartment building, the Venus Complex. I imagine it’s situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of the buildings from Evil Dead Rise and Satan’s Slaves 2.

When Lucía arrives, Rocío is just in the process of fleeing the building in terror, panicked by poltergeist style occurrences and, as we’ll soon enough learn, Alba’s tales of a woman (?) living in the empty apartment above them. The Servant, as Alba calls her, supposedly enters their apartment through nightmares, leaving creepy and curious gifts (a jar full of children’s tears, a nasty little knife, and so on) for Alba. Which would make me want to run as well. But estranged as the sisters may be, a bleeding Lucía is enough to convince Rocío to stay another night.

The morning after some bitter sisterly rows that do not keep Lucía up to date about the potentially supernatural nastiness going on, Rocío is suddenly gone. Lucía may not have been the best sister or aunt, but she’s certainly not going to leave her little niece without any grown-up supervision, which traps her in the Venus building.

Worse still, Lucía’s former employers have managed to narrow down her whereabouts to a couple of blocks; soon enough, her boss’s boss’s specialist for difficult problems, one Calvo (Francisco Boira), will narrow that down even further with the help of a hairball spitting clairvoyant.

While the gangsters are closing in, and other complications from that side ensue, Lucía has to cope with the increasing weirdness of what happens in the apartment: horrifying nightmares and strange visions, a folder of research about the Venus Complex left by her sister that suggests a history of cult activity, child sacrifices and cannibalism, and so on. The place is a horror show – and that’s before Lucía or the audience understand anything of what’s actually going on. At the same time, a mysterious, inexplicable astronomical body moves between the Earth and the Sun, promising a rather unplanned for by science eclipse right in time for the film’s climax.

Even though the plot of Jaume Balagueró’s Venus is more of a mix of very traditional bits of occult horror, just as traditional noirish crime movie tropes, and old-fashioned moments of pulpy weirdness, and is thus somewhat lacking in the originality stakes, I find myself enjoying the film and its approach to horror quite a bit. Given my predilections when it comes to horror, I am probably the ideal audience for this film, its general vibe of tropey goodness bloodied up a bit by a couple gallons of blood, made prettier by its director’s hand for slick yet moody visuals. I am especially enamoured of its complete disregard for logic and proper narrative sense for the climax. Plus, the tropes the film so lovingly reproduces are exactly the ones I can’t get enough of in horror, its story of a weird cult trying to conjure up something terrible for no good reason while colliding with a group of realistically shitty gangsters and a young woman who becomes increasingly, absurdly heroic once push comes to shove, pushing all of my narrative buttons while doing nothing that would annoy me.

Why, I’m even okay with the bizarre ending that goes high pulp in ways I actually haven’t seen before quite like this, but lacks in cohesion with the rest of the film. But then, once you accept the story’s basic conceits about the weirdness the cultists (who are a delightful mix of SM cosplayers, elderly guys who seem to have tentacles coming out of their anuses, and cultivated crazy elderly ladies) are concocting and how they do it, logic and cohesion stop being the point at all. As a matter of fact, even if you’re not as enamoured with the film’s whole vibe as I am, you might need to admit its last scene twist may be badly prepared by anything that came before, but does quite a wonderful thing by standing the classic horror movie bullshit ending on its head, providing a bizarre happy end that works well enough as an idea and a mood to be acceptable for the high pulp world the final act most certainly takes place in.