The Communion Girl
It’s a new town for teenage Sara, her parents hoping that she will make the best of it and find the right kind of friends at school and in the church, but feeling like an outsider Sara has instead become close with the appropriately named Rebe whose rebellious nature stems from an unhappy home life but who knows where the parties are and how to get into them.
Stranded in the early hours when their ride ditches them, Sara and Rebe instead hitch a lift with drug dealer Chivo and his friend Pedro; taking a back road through the forest Sara is sure she sees a girl dressed in white, but looking for her all they find is an abandoned communion doll which Sara’s sister Judit later tries to claim, Sara refusing, instinctively protecting Judit from something which she senses is a bad omen.
Set in rural Spain in the late eighties, the central pillar of the lives of the mothers who compete with barbed words and slights is the church, demanding conformity and looked upon as a source of ultimate truth, but when Sara (Carla Campra) seeks answers from Father Manuel about the doll he is dismissive, Rebe (Aina Quiñones) instead offering the story of The Communion Girl (La niña de la comunión) who went missing and now haunts the forest, any who see her cursed to forever be haunted.
Set in a stifling small community where her parents struggle to get by and her pushy aunt puts their perceived standing above happiness, The Communion Girl is directed by Víctor Garcia from a script co-written with Guillem Clua and Alberto Marini, creating a specific sense of time and place and contrasting the atmosphere of the holy days of sunny celebration with the nightlife of the nearby city and the darkened forest between the two.
The influences many and apparent, among the most obvious Ghost Story, Ringu, Kilómetro 31 and El orfanato, while good performances are drawn from the ensemble which includes Carlos Oviedo as Chivo, Marc Soler as Pedro, Olimpia Roch as Judit and Anna Alarcón as missing Marisol’s desperate mother Remedios Beltrán, the film never manages to find its own voice, instead standing as an adequately well-made but overly generic horror of the supernatural wrath of the wronged.
Reliant only on repeated jump scares, The Communion Girl promises more than is delivered, making apparent the hypocrisy of the church and its members which inform the toxic culture of the town made then sidelining those aspects in favour of something less interesting but presumably felt to be more commercial, the inevitable final shock indicating that the producers prefer to leave the gate to the catacombs open for another needless franchise of diminishing returns rather than a satisfying conclusion.
The Communion Girl will be available on Shudder from Friday 11th August
