| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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THE NAMELESS
(Los Sin Nombre)
Rating:  ½
Spain. 1999.
Director/Screenplay – Jaume Balaguero, Based on the Novel by Ramsey Campbell, Producers – Julio Fernandez & Joan Ginard, Photography – Xavi Gimenez, Music – Carles Casas, Special Effects – DDT, Art Direction – Matias Tikas. Production Company – Joan Ginard I-C/Sogedana/Via Digital/TVC.
Cast:
Emma Vilarasau (Claudia Gifford), Karra Elejalde (Bruno Massera), Tristan Ulloa (Quiroga), Carlos Lasarte (Santini), Pep Tosar (Toni), Jessica Del Pozo (Angela Gifford), Brendan Price (Marc Gifford)
Plot: Claudia Gifford is traumatized after police find the brutally murdered body of her daughter Angela. But five years later she receives a phone call from Angela, saying she is alive and that ‘they’ only wanted Claudia to believe that she was dead. Joined by retired detective Bruno Massera, Claudia follows a trail of clues that Angela urges her to take. But in so doing they realize that Angela is an innocent that has been chosen for sacrifice by a cult that practice ecstatic salvation through ultimate perversion.
Ramsey Cambell is such a prolific and popular horror novelist – 26 novels, the editor of innumerable anthologies and winner of several dozens horror fiction awards – that it is a surprise to find that this is the first ever film adapted from one of his works. This Spanish-made adaptation is the directorial debut of former genre fanzine editor (Zineshock) and award-winning short film maker Jaume Balaguero. The film comes with considerable acclaim, having won various Best Film awards at Sitges, Fantasporto and Brussels fantastic/horror film festivals.
The film starts out most promisingly. Most striking is Balaguero’s visual style – a cool look not unreminiscent of Se7en (1995) and many of the subsequent films that took their look from that – of burrowing into a visual darkness. It is as though all colour had been bled out of the frame and everything filmed in an all-pervading greyness that lights the faces of the characters with a bleakly haunted gauntness. This look is visually breathtaking and almost carries the film alone. But the film is problem ridden in that it is all very talky and little of the horror ever emerges from that which is spoken about to something we actually see. There are so many fascinating things brimming just beyond our grasp in the film – the child abduction, the sacrifice and corruption of an innocent, a Satanic cult that believe in ecstatic salvation through ultimate perversity, corrupted angels that refuse to take names (the nameless of the title). But there’s very seldom any of this that emerges on the screen – there’s one spookily haunting scene a few minutes in where the dead girl rings the mother telling her “They only wanted you to believe I was dead.” And in the middle of the show Carlos Lasarte gives an unnerving performance as the Hannibal Lecter-esque cult leader being interviewed in a jail cell. However take away all the abovementioned and there is almost nothing that would have to be changed in order to turn this into a routine police procedural about a detective and a mother searching for a missing girl. Balaguero generates such fine atmosphere that it is a shame that it is not supported by any teeth. The ending arrived at is joltingly abrupt.
Balaguero next went onto make the disappointing haunted house/occult film Darkness (2002), followed by the decent ghost story Fragile (2005) and [Rec] (2007) about an apartment full of infected zombies.
Copyright Richard Scheib 2001
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