Fantasia 2024 Film Review – PÁRVULOS (2024)

Parvulos is a superior survival horror invigorates the pandemic apocalypse blueprint with heart-wrenching family drama, jet-black hilarity, and vicious coming-of-age traumas.

Left to fend for themselves in a virus-ravaged world three young brothers subsist in a remote woodland cloaked hovel. Surviving in a culinary hell of worm smoothies, frogs, and dogs they also have to avoid an infected populous and hide from an evil religious cult that has filled the societal vacuum as they always do.

However, even darker terrors lurk in their young lives that won’t stay chained up in the basement much longer.

At first glance, director Isaac Ezban‘s labour of love seems like an overly generic slice of survival horror. His film shares many genetic strands, both narrative and visual, with films as diverse as Lord of the Flies, A Quiet Place, and Romero’s Day of the Dead to name but a few. There is also a seemingly obvious twist skulking in the wings that stinks of Shyamalanian misdirection.

Mercifully, the reveal happens very early on and the film proceeds to veer in directions you certainly won’t have seen coming. Instead of one clever rug pull it opts for nuanced character interactions and subtle world-building framed by a series of gruesome set-pieces. The result is an astonishingly entertaining, ultimately moving, horror flick that uses arthouse aesthetics to cauterise the bleeding wounds of a midnight movie.

Parvulos is a class act on multiple levels; Rodrigo Sandoval Vega Gil’s gorgeous cinematography is washed out within an inch of its life with intricate bursts of colour mirroring the precarious nature of hope driving the film’s narrative. The performances of the three young leads are genuinely affecting, with a fine balance between innocence and survival instincts that may shock many viewers. The feral secrets of the basement are equally well portrayed with sadness, brutality, and gut-churning practical effects.

Technically arresting and creatively brave it possesses a thematic richness that fascinates as vigorously as it repels. Our planet still bears the scars of the coronavirus pandemic, each of us has memories, bad and good, that have shaped our worldview. Ezban and his fellow writers have distilled these hazy recollections and feelings into a nightmarish microcosm of isolation and anxiety set against a backdrop of childhoods interrupted.

Boredom, is, of course, a major component of lockdown life. The lads only own one solitary record and a single film, played endlessly on a loop with their bicycle-powered screen. This illustrates perfectly the contempt that breeds in the recesses of overfamiliarity and feels oddly reminiscent of the legendary “The Walking Dead.

In one superbly executed scene the two youngest boys, Parvulos translates into English as toddlers, are playing a homemade card-matching memory game. Each picture represents a thing they miss from before, such as pizza and PlayStations. We only glimpse these images, just as they may do in a slowly fading mind’s eye. 

As our protagonists desperately cling to the remnants of the family routine like addled zoo animals we get a tangible sense of their stoical desire to protect each other. Also, more disturbingly we witness the ever-present frustrations of constant mindfulness boil over into anger and violence.

Channelling the worst fears of the modern anti-vaxxer movement and survivalists alike, Parvulos pushes over the precipice of the worst we could have imagined into the gore-soaked canyons of exploitation cinema, and it is there it finds its true spiritual home.

Once the family dynamic becomes irreparably disrupted by an interloper, in a spectacularly violent fashion, the film fully embraces its B movie sensibilities for a wildly implausible ride towards its deeply ironic conclusion.

Whatever your expectations of this film are they will certainly be confounded. If the frequent child violence does not catch you off guard, then the absurd darkness of its core premise and the jolts of humorous farce that ambush like coked-up spider monkeys will.

★★★★

Fantasia Film Festival / Carla Adell, Leonardo Cervantes, Felix Farid Escalante, Norma Flores, Noe Hernandez, Horacio Lazo, Mateo Ortega / Dir: Isaac Ezban / Red Elephant Films / TBC