Life is not easy for Nino (Nicolás Diaz), a gay boy in Argentina who regularly gets beaten up by his peers and is then blamed for being a bad influence on them. His father is often away due to his work, leaving his much-younger mother Elsa (Maria Soldi) to manage the household, which includes Nino and his teenage sister Natalia (Martina Grimaldi). Everyone in town is religious, but it’s the kind of religion that condemns gay people but not those who beat them unconscious.
In the hopes of buying a little time for Nino to grow up in peace, the family moves to a tiny rural community in Santiago del Estero. Natalia is not pleased to be leaving her friends behind, but her parents counsel her to be patient and think of her brother’s needs. The village has its own problems, however: a local boy named Panchito recently disappeared while walking in the forest, and the locals think it was the work of the “almamula,” a monster who lives there.
The name “almamula” means “carnal sins” and the monster of that name appears in various guises in Argentinian folklore. In this version of events, the almamula was a woman who slept with just about everyone in town, including her father and brother, and was punished by being turned into a forest-dwelling monster. There, she lies in wait for anyone who commits impure acts (a.k.a., forbidden sexual behavior) and drags them off, never to be heard from again.
That’s the kind of story that carries two messages—do what the church says or else and stay out of the forest. The latter is good general advice for non-supernatural reason, including the danger from real-life wild beasts and human predators who might be hiding out there, while the former is pretty much what you would expect from a community where diversity is lacking and religion gives structure to daily life. It doesn’t offer much help to an adolescent boy who is just becoming aware of his own sexuality and needs to learn to manage it, not suppress it.
Writer/director Juan Sebastián Torales based the story of Almamula partly on his own experiences growing up gay in Santiago del Estero. In it, he offers a third interpretation of the Almamula legend: the real monster is not in the forest but in the people who would banish and destroy whatever they don’t understand. Nino is drawn to the forest, despite all the warnings, just as he is driven to explore his sexuality, and has some experiences that he doesn’t know how to process.
Almamula is a mood piece that proceeds at a leisurely pace and in which much more is implied than is shown. It doesn’t have much in the way of traditional horror scares, observing the Val Lewton principle that what you can’t see is scarier than what you can, and the resulting ambiguity is vital to its effects. Torales lets the story unfold in a leisurely manner, an effort aided by the atmospheric cinematography of Ezequiel Salinas and music by Matteo Locasciulli.
Almamula won Best First Feature at the In and Out Film and Video Festival and was nominated for awards at several festivals, including Best First Feature and Best Film in the Generation 14plus division at the Berlin International Film Festival, the Gold Q-Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival, and Best Latin American Film at the San Sebástian International Film Festival. | Sarah Boslaugh
Alamula had its New York premier at NewFest 2023 and is available for home viewing through Oct. 24 through the festival web site.
