Luciferum
2021 · 14m · Argentina
Directed by Martín De La Cruz
Trying desperately to contact her dead mother, a young woman uses a Ouija board and unknowingly endangers herself and her friends by summoning evil spirits.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a Ouija board movie—the premise alone tells you this was made by committee. De La Cruz doesn't subvert the setup or even complicate it; he just executes the familiar beats with competence, which is exactly the kind of thing that puts me to sleep.
A classically structured supernatural thriller that understands the grammar of possession cinema, though it traffics in well-worn tropes rather than advancing the form—solid craft in service of familiar conventions.
The sound design is where this lives: De La Cruz uses negative space and the specificity of how spirits *move* through audio rather than relying on jump-cuts, and that single directorial instinct—trusting the ear over the eye—is what separates this from dozens of other Ouija-board-goes-wrong shorts.