Veronica (2017)

Paco Plaza's Veronica arrives dressed as a possession picture and behaves like one, which is to say it has no interest in being anything else. The setting is Vallecas, Madrid, 1991, and the machinery is familiar: a solar eclipse, a Ouija board in a school basement, a teenage girl left to mind three younger siblings while her widowed mother works the hours the plot requires. The cast is uniformly Spanish, which for a Spanish film shot in a Spanish neighborhood is not a gesture of inclusion but simply the weather. We note it. We move on.

The film does place a fifteen-year-old girl at its center, and around her it arranges a blind nun, a weary mother, and two schoolfriends. A case could be assembled from this arrangement. The film declines to assemble it. Veronica's terror is domestic and supernatural, aimed at the nerves instead of the conscience, and what she endures is the ordeal of a haunted teenager in a haunted apartment. The single lecture in the picture, delivered by a teacher about ancient eclipse sacrifices, exists to explain why a shattered glass cup might summon something, and it lasts exactly as long as that job takes.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. There is no LGBTQ content, no racial commentary, no environmental lament, no indictment of the modest economy that keeps the mother away from her children. Her long shifts are texture. The first period that arrives mid-haunting is a plot beat about blood and burn marks, not a meditation on self-acceptance. The real 1991 Vallecas case is borrowed for atmosphere and then abandoned, which is what horror films do with true stories. The craft survives: a child actress doing real work, a director who knows where to put the camera, and a demon that never overstays. A restrained vintage. We score it accordingly and pour the next.

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