By Simon Thompson
Directors/co-writers Kyle Garrett Greenburg and Anna Maguire’s Galicia! is a documentary-horror film that answers the question of what if someone made Cannibal Holocaust boring. Moving with all the speed and urgency of Celtics era Shaq and completely devoid of any atmosphere or misdirection, Galicia! squanders what could have been a really interesting urban fish out of water rural horror ( think Deliverance or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) with a dull apocalypse plot instead.
The story follows a couple (Anna Maguire and Kyle Garrett Greenburg), on a trip to Galicia, Spain, to visit their friends who run a winery in the region. As they travel through Spain an escalating series of natural disasters keep happening.
The main issue with Greenburg, Maguire, and co-writer Saffron Weaver’s script is that what would be the inciting incident in any other movie doesn’t happen until about the final ten minutes. As a result, you’re instead left with travelogues of the world’s most irritating couple, who I could best describe as some kind of unholy The Thing style hybrid between a BuzzFeed article circa 2015 and the Doritos friend chips gang.
The cinematography is going for a naturalistic video camera look, which with the exception of a couple interesting edits, isn’t particularly interesting to look at. This is because in contrast to something like The Blair Witch Project, the first six seasons of The X Files, Twin Peaks, Backrooms, Stephen King at his best, or Mark Z Danieleswki’s House Of Leaves there is no richly formed mythology or darkness lurking in the underlying narrative, so what you are left with instead is a cast of uninteresting characters.
Overall Galicia! is an anaemically paced sixty minutes, that feels less like watching a horror film, and more like being strapped in, Ludovico technique style, trapped watching the holiday comings and goings of characters who are about as fun and likeable as that one self -appointed ‘cool’ teacher (whom everyone has had at some point in their time at school) who tries condescendingly to ‘relate’ to their class. To borrow a line from the great Vincent Canby, watching Galicia! ‘felt like a forced four-hour walking tour of one’s own living room.’
