By JM Cozzoli
Zombos Says: Unrelenting, bleak, dark. You probably won’t want to watch this a second time, but if you are looking for soul-withering horror, this one will do it.
Director José María Cicala makes sure everyone knows he’s pulling some Lynchian surrealness and quirk into his movie, The Dollmaker (Encantador), by the hint on Tomas’s family mailbox: it says Familia Lynch. Tomás (played all too well by Rodrigo Noya) is a quirky and weird little guy wearing thick glasses, who volunteers in a clinic but clerks in the local video store called Boy Scouts where he and his co-workers dress in Boy Scout uniforms. He has some serious mom issues, so cue the Psycho leanings, but there’s also a little something borrowed from Ryan Reynolds’ often overlooked horror, The Voices, patched in here, so what’s taking place in the small town of Palacios is even more grotesquely disturbing to watch.
This movie may try at some lighter moments but forget about that: Rodrigo Noya’s incessant cuteness and blankness will have none of it. He creates an unforgettable character that is funny in appearance only. The sign just outside of town says donde nada malo puede suceder–where nothing bad happens–but that’s a lie. Young women are disappearing. Only the newly arrived police inspector (Alejo Garciá Pintos) asks questions while his bumbling partner and the chief (Mario Alarcon) don’t show concern.
Argentina’s horror movies have been coming on strong with Terrified (Aterrados, 2017) and When Evil Lurks (Cuando acecha la maldad, 2023). José María Cicala and co-writer Griselda Sanchez create a nasty brew of small town secrets, odd characters, and grisly murder. There isn’t much gore, but what’s here is unnerving and bloody enough. Most of the secrets will remain, but little effort is spent hiding who the killer is–you can easily guess that quickly–because Tomás has a better relationship with his dolls than he does with people.
It takes a turn for the worse when he tries to start a new relationship with a waitress, Argentina (Griselda Sanchez) from the Trixie Diner, during a group therapy session at the clinic. Cue the Psycho bits. Flashes of horrendous scenes of violence provide clues to the inevitable end to come. But then the ending goes all cuckoo too, so your on your own with that one. The always on, black and white, television showing Tomás’s childhood birthday is persistent in replaying a tape he hates seeing, but his mom likes it.
What we can be sure of is what Tomás is seeing, or not, depending on his mood. He does have a fantasy of becoming the president of Argentina some day, and the cuckoo ending winds around that. But before we get there his dolls, which are little nightmares in themselves, the missing women, and Argentina disrupt his small, carefully controlled world of mom, video store, and clinic. There’s also something not quite right going on at the video store with its heavily chained basement door, or with the triplet brothers who look alike, a priest, a doctor, and the video store owner (all played by Arturo Puig).
One notable visual subtext of The Dollmaker is the stark contrast between the presumed normality of the quiet small town of Palacios and the boisterous normality of Trixie Diner, with its cross-dressers and gay people-filled karaoke nights. The transgression of sexual pluralism has always been a strong catalyst in many horror movies. Here, it is turned around. The diner’s patrons may be loud, theatrical, socially gender-nonconforming, but they are not the source of the town’s secret corruption. The diner is the place where identity is revealed and normalized. The more conventional spaces of Palacios, the clinic, the police department, Tomás’s home, and the Boy Scouts Video Store are where identity is concealed and deviating from the norm. The diner’s flamboyance and acceptance is a refutation to Tomás’s hidden doll-filled world and overt control of his mom. The Dollmaker‘s horror comes not from the people who visibly depart from the town’s norms through Trixie’s Diner, but in the monstrosities happening outside of it by those pretending at normalcy.
Come to think of it, I did watch this movie a second time. It can grow on you. Not in a healthy way. Just grow on you in an unsettling way. Argentine horror has a tendency to do that.