By Nia Edwards-Behi
It’s the 1950s. Montse (Macarena Gomez) lives with her younger sister, Hermana (Nadia de Santiago), in a small apartment. Both their parents are dead, but their father (Luis Tosar) remains a spectral figure in the apartment for the burdened and fragile older woman. Hermana has just turned 18, and Montse struggles to see her as an adult, having spent many years looking after her. What’s more, Montse suffers from agoraphobia, but briefly overcomes her fear when a neighbour, Carlos (Hugo Silva), injures himself falling down the stairs outside their door. Montse brings the man into the apartment in order to nurse him back to health…but in doing so, sets the scene for her own unravelling and the undoing of her relationship with her sister.
The biggest strength of Shrew’s Nest is certainly its design elements – the set, costumes, hair and make-up are all spot on. These all give the film a very definite sense of place, and given that the whole film, more or less, takes place on one apartment, it’s important that said sense of place it well done. Elsewhere, for me, the film was less impressive. It’s not so much that the film is bad – far from it – it’s just that there’s a lot of visual polish on what is a relatively underwhelmingly and predictable melodrama.
I don’t have anything against melodrama, that’s for sure, and as I’ve said elsewhere I rather enjoy it. The trouble for me with Shrew’s Nest is that it’s really rather po-faced and serious melodrama. Central to my dislike of the narrative is the fact that it’s called Shrew’s Nest (or, I believe, just ‘Shrews’ in the original Spanish). There’s nothing wrong with depicting a typically shrewish character, and indeed the period setting befits this quite nicely. However, Macarena Gomez’s performance is hysterical from the outset. It’s certainly not a bad performance, it just doesn’t go anywhere, and truly verges on the hammy by the film’s climax. In a film that took itself less seriously, this wouldn’t have been quite so out of place.
The characterisation in the film is relatively superficial as well, with the traumatised older sister (I mean, when Luis Tosar plays the over-bearing dad you know something went wrong in the past), the gutsy younger sister, and the suave womaniser joined only by a cast of minor characters who do little but meddle. It doesn’t help that Hermana, who I’m fairly certain we’re meant to be sympathetic toward, was, for me, entitled and bratty throughout. Compounded with the fact that Carlos is a total creep from the start, and yet these two women fall head over heels for him, I didn’t feel I had any characters to really side with.
The unfolding of the narrative is predictable to the end, but it does get pleasingly gorier as it goes on. In that regard the film is very well done, again, so technically the film has a great deal going for it. It’s nice to see a horror film’s central psycho be a woman with daddy issues, rather than yet another sub-Bates mummy’s boy, but all things considered she’s not much of an original psycho, either.
I would recommend Shrew’s Nest, for sure, as it’s a very well-made film. For me, though, I just didn’t feel like I cared enough for the characters to really submit to the film’s world nor its story, and therefore finished the film feeling distinctly unsatisfied.