Resurrección
2022 · 10m · Perú
Directed by Francisco Toledo
Genres: fantasy, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, tense, theatrical
A demon that died and was locked away more than 200 years ago in the basement of an old house is freed and resurrected by a little girl; the girl's mother decides to call Father Pablo to perform an exorcism and end the demon that possesses her.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent possession-exorcism theater, but Toledo plays it pretty straight—there's no formal subversion or narrative trap waiting to flip the premise, just a demon and a priest doing what demons and priests do in basements.
Toledo's staging of the exorcism ritual carries real liturgical weight and formal restraint; the 10-minute structure respects the theatrical tradition of the genre while the basement setting grounds the supernatural in architectural specificity—this is a film aware of its lineage and disciplined in its execution.
The choice to let a child's innocent act of resurrection drive the entire moral engine is smart, and there's a specific tonal calibration here—theatrical without camp, dark without cynicism—that suggests Toledo knows exactly which moments to hold and which to cut.