By Simon Thompson
Felipe Vargas’s Carnivora is a bloody, tense, and spectacularly paced short film which at a taut twelve minutes is definitely worth your time. The short tells the story of two sisters Maribel, (played by Carmela Zumbado) and Ana, ( played by Gigi Zumbado). Ana has left the siblings’ hometown to live in Chicago, while Maribel has elected to stay to take care of their sick grandmother (Julia Vera), since their mother who was in charge of her wellbeing has mysteriously disappeared and neither sibling knows how or why. As the story progresses further, however, it becomes abundantly clear that this seemingly frail old lady is hiding some kind of terrifying secret.
Carnivora works because Vargas and screenwriter Vee Saieh establish an ominous and menacing atmosphere from the outset-to the extent that I could barely breathe for the last five or six minutes. Vargas is a director who clearly understands the principle of ‘show don’t tell’ to the fullest, utilising well timed sound cues and sharp cuts, rather than falling into the trap of having the characters speak in walls of text announcing every single titbit of what is happening. The colour palette by cinematographer Kim Cohen is well selected, with the contrast between the natural light provided by the movie’s exterior location and the washed, almost sepia-toned interiors creating a strong lasting effect.
The performances by both Gigi Zumbado and Carmela Zumbado are grounded and believable to the point that even if you didn’t know the two leads were sisters in real life you would still completely buy them as siblings anyway. Julia Vera also does a superb job in the part of the grandmother, giving the character a great deal of pathos and humanity rather than making her a cheap Scooby Do-style monster of the week in the way that a much lesser performer would do.
Armed with an unpretentious and intentionally sparse script, strong acting, clever sound design, genuinely visceral gore, and a palpable sense of claustrophobia and menace, Carnivora is a first rate short by a director who unmistakably has an astute understanding of both short-form storytelling and the horror genre. It works as a movie because it doesn’t try to be something that it is not and instead amplifies what it is, a no holds barred, unabashedly simple little chiller.
Bloody Flicks 