Movie Nation

Sentimental and sympathetically-acted, actor-director Chiwetel Ejiofor’s “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” immerses us in Third World subsistence farming and the struggle just to have enough to eat in poor, corrupt countries in the developing world.

This Around the World with Netflix film, based on a true story, takes us to rural Malawi in Africa and introduces us to customs, rituals and the difficulties of life that is lived, harvest to harvest.

But when you title your film “Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” you’re giving away the climax, unless you realize that you cannot make that your climax. Ejiofor’s movie teases and never lets us forget exactly where it’s heading. And it uses an almost unforgivable amount of its running time taking us where we know it is going.

William (Maxwell Simba) is a young teen growing up in Wimbe, a village where the corn is grown by hand and survival is measured in the baskets of dried maize you have in your larder. His father Trywell (Ejiofor, of “Twelve Years a Slave”) works the land he bought with his brother. But as the film opens, that brother dies. Trywell’s control over how the land is cultivated and guarded against flooding is in jeopardy.

Still, he’s got a couple of bright kids. Older daughter Annie (Lily Banda of TV’s “Deep State”) is waiting to get into college. Their mother (Aïssa Maïga of the French films “Paris J’taime” and “Cache”) insists on it. William is on a similar track. It’s just that their local school isn’t free, and Dad’s “after the harvest” isn’t going to cover tuition that’s due now.

Ejiofor teases “the solution” to their problems before all those problems — government corruption and indifference, drought and flood cycles, lumber exploitation, a romance tugging Annie off her path — are laid out in exacting and somewhat laborious detail.

William is the in-demand tinkerer in Wimbe. Everybody brings their radios to him to fix. And as he rummages through a nearby junkyard, we see the wheels turning in his head as he picks up this old battery or that half-broken water pump. Someday he’s going to discover the word “dynamo,” but we can already see the lightbulb flickering on and off over his head.

Ejiofor milks the cascading crises piling up on this family for all they’re worth. When Trywell looks at his boy and informs him “No one is coming to help us, you have to be a man, now” (in English and Chichewa with English subtitles), we can see William straining at the bit, dying to try out his big idea on his old man.

That spoiler-title and long, teasing storytelling style hamper the film, making “Boy Who Harnessed the Wind” a classic 90 minute movie hidden 113 minute one, and the story arc a classic wait-too-late-to-get-to-the-point melodrama. The “Eureka” moment should have come earlier, perhaps written into a race against the clock to make things work before people starve, or an exploration of how life was forever changed by this Big New Thing.

The “Boy” here has the reins, has the wind and starts to piece together what he’ll need for his harness. Ejiofor needed to let him have it and find more of a movie out of what came afterwards.

Rating: TV-PG, violence

Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Maxwell Simba, Aïssa Maïga and Lily Banda

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor, based on the book by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

A pasty-faced, red ball-capped, pickup truck-driving Tennessean dumps a truckload of red rubber balls into a river, drives down the road, removes a sniper rifle with a Confederate flag sticker on it, and pops those calls from a great distance as target practice.

When next we see him, he’s in prison, his public defender is trying to get something — ANYthing — out of him. The FBI doesn’t even know his name, because “Amos Otis” wasn’t just the name of a 1970s pro baseball player, it’s the name of the owner of the pickup, an African American man who died some days before.

“Who is Amos Otis?” is a long-winded and dull Jeremiad about assassination, its motivations and the historic implications of killing a “divisive” and “destructive” American president who was destined to end American democracy, but didn’t.

Yes, writer-director Greg Newberry has concocted a stumbling, monotonous “What if somebody killed Trump?” parable.

The inmate (Josh Katawick) asks his attorney (Rico Reid) even asks his attorney for one thing — “an orange.” A Nazi/racist gun nut sold the guy the rifle, he’s taken a beating in jail, and bomb threats delay his trial.

Once the witness is brought to trial, as the country descends into call-out-the-National-Guard unrest, with many “dancing in the streets” at the murder, and supporters of the dead president rioting in fury, “Amos Otis” takes a turn into “The Twilight Zone.”

A prosecutor frets that “All he needs is one ‘X-Files’ fan.” Perhaps a few “flux capacitor/Marty McFly” cracks will upend the man’s arguments before the jury. The defendant blurting out events set to occur in a few days can be “stricken from the record,” but might they make his “Terminator” case?

There’s a deeply unsettling premise and historical argument at the heart of “Who is Amos Otis?” Mainstream from as “The Assassination Bureau” to “The King’s Man,” a famous Martin Landau episode of “The Twilight Zone,” even a Stephen Sondheim musical have dabbled with the assassin’s hope to alter history, for better or worse, with a bomb, poison or a gun.

How would America’s future differ if this or that key figure today died? More to the point, if “The Catcher in the Rye” can inspire murders, how dangerous is it for a movie — even one with a science fiction premise, to consider assassination as a societal, historical and global force for change?

Sondheim’s “Assassins” wasn’t revived on Broadway until after Donald Trump left office. Kathy Griffin wrecked her career by holding up a fake bloody Trump head on camera. I once stopped a newspaper where I worked from running a photo of the then-president with a sniper’s bullseye superimposed over it — for a book review. You have to be seriously tone deaf or cloistered to not realize the mere suggestion of that is dangerous, could earn you a visit from the Secret Service, and is not helpful.

Putting a smug and twisted “Thank you for your service” in here is more suited to an “own the wingnuts on Twitter” post than a serious movie.

Science fiction and “alternate history” have engaged in this moral, ethical and “butterfly effect” discussion before, but never with a guy wearing a red “America Strong Forever” cap, and never with the veiled subject of this thought exercise still storming about, holding fascist rallies as his political backers prep for a possible coup while an attorney general dithers away the urgent need to prosecute him.

If any of this played into Gravitas Ventures’ decision to distribute “Amos Otis,” then good for them for at least having the debate. But the best argument for releasing “Who is Amos Otis?” might be the end product itself. Tedious courtroom scenes, flat acting, sermonizing speeches, under-explained “explanations” of the technology needed — nobody is likely to stick with this to the end.

Rating: not rated, profanity

Cast: Josh Katawick, Rico Reid, Christine Brunner, Derek Snow,

Credits: Scripted and directed by Greg Newberry. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:44

The planetary reboot of the pandemic — thanks, anti-vaxxers/anti-maskers/morons — means that most major movie releases have been yanked off the schedule of what is already a traditionally slow month at the box office.

“The 355” and “Scream” and “Old Guys Get Kicked in the Crotch” (“Jackass”) are about the only wide opening films to come our way this month.

As expected, the mediocre women-in-action thriller “The 355” opened with a fizzle. $4.8 million isn’t all that.

That just edged “The King’s Man,” which opened Christmas and isn’t doing all that well, either. It’s earned $74 million worldwide, another $3.27 million of that coming this weekend.

“The Matrix” remains a corpse, rotting through another $1.86 million. It did better overseas, about $35 million in north America, another $90 abroad. It lost about a third of its screens.

On the upside, “Sing 2” pulled in another $11-12 million. That pushes it over $100 million. It will pass “Encanto” by month’s end. Disney’s latest has lost most of its screens and peaked out just over $112 domestically.

“American Underdog” cleared $2.41 million this weekend. It will probably finish its run at month’s end with about $26 million. Not awful, but not all that.

“West Side Story” did about $1.4 million.

“Ghostbusters: Afterlife” added another $1.14.

“Licorice Pizza” earned just over $1 million, and is losing screens. One thing that helps underperformers like it is the fact that major releases have pulled out of January. It’ll stick around, even in its weakened state, until Oscar nominations are announced.

That goes for “Licorice,” “C’mon, C’mon,” “West Side Story” and “House of Gucci,” which eeked over the $50 million mark at long last this weekend.

Figures are coming through via Exhibitor Relations and Box Office Pro.

The winner of the weekend, of course? “Spider-Man: No Way Home” pulled in another $33 million and change. I tellya, that Willem Dafoe/Alfred Molina fanbase will not be denied.

A mystery torn from the pages of Scandinavian history, “Margrete: Queen of the North” becomes a taut and tense tale in the hands of Danish director Charlotte Sieling.

The filmmaker takes us back to an age when the mechanical clock had just been invented and serves up a classic “ticking clock” thriller of Byzantine intrigues, schemes and power-grabs in the early days of the Kalmar Union. “Margrete,” a “fiction inspired by real events,” is a history lesson wrapped in a damned entertaining movie.

For a stretch during the 14th through the early 16th centuries, the ever-warring Nordic states of Norway, Denmark and Sweden were ruled as one, largely thanks to the machinations and diplomatic wheeling and dealing of Queen Margrete.”Margrete” shows the lengths that queen was willing to go to in order to preserve her peaceful “perfect” union.

We meet Margrete (Queen Margaret I ) of Denmark on a battlefield, a child who watches her father King Valdemar wash the blood off his hands and off the signet ring that symbolizes his power. She grabs it for safe keeping. Even then, she had her eyes on a prize.

Over 40 years later, Margrete, “the greatest and most pious regent The North has ever known,” is in her glory. Trine Dyrholm plays the ruler and matriarch with a wily and self-satisfied but high-minded air, a woman who stands among the nobles of three nations at court and persuades them that this union has kept the peace, but that they all need to pitch in for an “army so strong the Germans will never dare attack us (in Danish).”

The “Teutonic Order” of Prussia has designs on their territories, the self-same invaders who worried Russia’s Ivan the Terrible a century later.

Margrete and her version of England’s various archbishop “chief ministers,” the ever-scheming head of the church, Peder (Søren Malling) who helped her see her dreams of “peace” and “prosperity” through unity come true. Her only son died some years before, but she adopted her great nephew Erik (Morten Hee Andersen) and as regent rules this new alliance with Erik as King.

Her answer to the Teutonic threat? Marry Erik to an English princess and form an alliance with England. The film’s creepiest scene introduces us to this little girl, Philippa, reciting her greetings at court to her much-older intended, in French. Paul Blackthorne brings an arched-eyebrow cunning to William Bourcier, the English crown’s negotiator on her behalf.

But just as these plans are set to fall into place, the Norwegian third of the alliance brings in a man claiming to be her son, the “dead” Olaf (Jakob Oftebro), with the Norwegians backing his claim to the throne over Erik.

Margrete and we in the audience smell a rat. As it was rumored she’d had the boy killed 15 years before, how could this be? If that was true, will she have to admit her guilt? If not, will she “recognize her own child,” if indeed this could be her long lost son?

Dyrholm lets us see the wheels turning as she tries to buy time, to keep a lid on all of this, and to figure out who is behind this sudden and sure-to-be-divisive appearance.

She’ll need a trusted noble (Simon J. Berger) and her favorite pirate named Roar (Linus James Nilsson), and maybe the aid of a hostage she rescued from the pirate’s clutches, Astrid (Agnes Westerlund Rase) whom she’s made a lady in waiting.

Can they uncover what’s really happening, reveal any plot and plotters that may be involved before the union breaks into factions and the whole enterprise dissolves, inviting foreign invasion?

Sieling, who directed the Danish drama “The Man,” as well as episodes of “Homeland” and ironically, “Queen of the South” in Hollywood, keeps the “public trial” of the would-be heir quiet and suspenseful and the behind-the-scenes scheming calm, deliberate and believable.

No one wants to be labeled a “tyrant” in this union. They’re all very concerned with appearances. Margrete keeps her own counsel, weighing and wondering, questioning and maneuvering. But Peder’s right when he says (the film is in Danish, Swedish, German, Norwegian and English) “His presence alone stirs chaos.”

The acting demonstrates a desire for self-control amongst the veteran statesman and woman, with all the fireworks coming from the newly-threatened king and the life-on-the-line man on trial, the would-be king.

Screen veteran Dyrholm (“A Royal Affair,” “In a Better World”) gives Margrete human layers beneath all that stoic statecraft. Dyrholm’s performanace maintains the story’s mystery, as if she herself is only warily asking questions she may not want the answers to.

And Sieling, who co-wrote the script, turns the third act into a nerve-wracking hunt for spies and treachery in an alliance that’s unraveling almost too fast for the “truth” to set anybody free, or send the villains to the gallows.

It all makes for a more riveting “what might have happened” mystery, a history lesson with a caveat and a damned entertaining one at that.

Rating: unrated, violence and nudity

Cast: Trine Dyrholm, Søren Malling, Morten Hee Andersen, Agnes Westerlund Rase, Jakob Oftebro, Simon J. Berger and Linus James Nilsson

Credits: Directed by Charlotte Sieling, scripted by Jesper Fink, Maya Ilsøe and Charlotte Sieling. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 2:00

You’re allowed to be confused by what unfolds in the mix-and-match Italian romance “Four to Dinner.” Not that you need my permission. If you’ve watched it, you got there all on your own.

It’s a thought exercise tale about two couples, bouncing willy nilly between them as they are paired-up with this prospective mate, then that one, playing out all the possibilities of how things might have turned out if this “soulmate” had found that one, or decided that somebody else was a better fit in his or her life.

So it’s a tale of “fate” and “fated to be together,” sort of like “Sliding Doors,” if you remember that far back. Only it makes far less sense, and manages to be far more frustrating as well. Whatever screenwriter Martino Coli and director Alessio Maria Federici were shooting for, it’s not clear they had it figured out, just a winning cast, a lot of coupling (sans sex-scenes) and some vague thesis that “we have many potential ‘soulmates.'”

A clumsy framing device has this story of two couples related by a married couple (Flavio Furno and Marta Gastini) tell some dinner guests how they set these other two couples up. The twist? Husband Luca (Furno) gives the guests a “true” version of the story, and a lot of false ones.

As in “rock star mathematician” Giulia (Matolde Gioli) might have hooked up with womanizing lawyer Dario (Giuseppe Maggio), flirting just long enough to get across the notion how “DTF” she is. But maybe she didn’t stop with him. Maybe she hooked up with “laid back” publishing editor Matteo (Matteo Martari), too. And maybe he was the one who got her pregnant and changed their destinies.

Or maybe wary, smart anesthesiologist Chiara (Ilenia Pastorelli), who is holding out for Mr. Right, was more Matteo’s speed. Then again, maybe she’s “the one” who could make Dario give up his bed-hopping ways.

“It’s just that I don’t go out with guys like you any more,” (in dubbed English, or Italian with subtitles) sounds like a challenge. Maybe Dario will accept it.

Clunky “stories within a story” structure aside, there are a few novel moments and a genuinely sweet one or two. Might Matteo, who hates to “plan,” have taken Chiara to his favorite out-of-the-way restaurant only to find out there’s a wedding booked for the evening, and only the bride’s adorable intervention saves their “first date?” Throwing yourself into an Italian Jewish wedding of strangers is classic “meet cute/date cute.”

Might unromantic Giulia fall in love with the guy who got her pregnant? Might true love be tested by “fated” infidelity?

“Four to Dinner” came close to drawing me in, here and there. Gioli has a beguiling brassiness and vulnerability, and Martari brings an offhanded haplessness to the character he shares his name with.

But the constant jumping back and forth in multiverse-styled timelines is more exasperating than charming, thought-provoking or even entertaining. Perhaps there’s a better way of organizing this, following one story for longer stretches, fewer “two months later” interludes.

Probably not. Once we “get” the “many soulmates in the multiverse” gimmick, the movie needs to get to its point. It never does.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Matilde Gioli, Ilenia Pastorelli, Matteo Martari, Giuseppe Maggio, Flavio Furno and Marta Gastini

Credits: Directed by Alessio Maria Federici, scripted by Martino Coli. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:45

The lone feature film by American documentarian James Blue is a fascinating cinematic time capsule, a glimpse at the last days of French colonial Algeria. As you might expect from a filmmaker who worked mostly on non-fiction films, it’s a picture that immerses us in a reality, with real locations and “the real people of Algeria” as its co-stars.

It’s a French “memory play” filmed in the Italian neo-realist style, adapted by an American. And it’s much more than a curiosity.

“The Olive Trees of Justice” is based on a novel “Les oliviers de la justice,” by its Algerian-born French co-star, Jean Pélégri. A new restoration and release by Kino Lorber reveals this 60 year-old film as no mere artifact or relic very much of its moment. It’s a sentimental but biting remembrance of an Algeria that was by a clear-eyed Frenchman who has returned as the country’s war for independence is ending.

Jean (Pierre Prothon), in his mid-30s, has returned to the land of his birth and youth to be with his dying father (actor/writer Pélégri). As Jean wanders the streets — filled with locals, but also with French soldiers, barricades and checkpoints — Jean tries to catch up with childhood friends. He narrates his thoughts and impressions, and he flashes back to his pre-World War II youth, when his father owned a vineyard where young Jean played with Arab friends and interacted with Arab farm workers, devout Muslims and others.

Jean never comes right out and says it, but he “gets” this revolt. He may be considering moving back. But when he declares he has no desire to “kowtow to every Arab,” his flashbacks suggest to he recognizes the European privilege he grew up under, the deference and indulgence even much older Arabic men showed him as a child of nine.

Chasing a man’s chickens with his bike might have earned an Arab child a slap. Jean had the immunity of his race. He remembers his father’s sometimes stern and even irritable dealings with his laborers. But the old man, who lost that farm years back, understands what the natives want. He may not approve of some of the acts of terrorism — cutting down vines and olive trees from French farms. But he could see it coming.

“I’m not surprised they’re rebelling,” he tells his son (in French with English subtitles). “Nobody talks to them anymore.”

Blue, using untrained actors for his supporting cast, immerses us in the place and this moment in time. We see childhood memories of the dowsing Dad did, hunting for water to feed his grapevines, of kids playing in the irrigation ditches and workers heedlessly spraying poisonous powder on the vines to protect against insects.

Blue doesn’t give us “The Battle of Algiers.” The war is omnipresent, with soldiers searching Arabs on every street corner, every drive — even the one to bury his father — means passing through checkpoints.

But that’s just one deciding factor in Jean’s pondering moving his wife and son here. The idyllic childhood he remembers is gone. And the sometimes brittle conversations with people from his past tell him that maybe it wasn’t as idyllic from their point of view. He hears how clueless his father’s cousin Louise (Huguette Poggi) sounded then, and even now.

“Force is the only thing ‘they’ understand,'” she hisses, suggesting “it’s in their religion” and that “shooting ten of them” as reprisal for attacks against property might “settle this.”

“The Olive Trees of Justice” is languid but never feels slow. It tells a story but not really with words and dialogue. And it traffics in sentiment without getting lost in sentimentality.

Seeing this on the heels of the latest Sean Baker (“Tangerine,” “The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket”) reminds us it wasn’t just the Italians who mastered neo-realism, and such films have never gone away. Here’s a film from the distant past that reminds us this is still perhaps the most immersive way to tell a story on the screen, peppering your picture with real people, showing us their lives and using that to lend authority to the fictional characters they interact with.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Pierre Prothon, Jean Pélégri, Huguette Poggi, Boralfa and Said Achaibou

Credits: Directed by James Blue, scripted by Sylvain Dhomme and James Blue, based on novel by Jean Pélégri. A Pathe film, a Kino Lorber restoration/release.

Running time: 1:22

A no-name cast, emptied-out settings, a sort of unstuck in time plot.

This one comes our way Feb. 11.

Today’s tale of good actors making horrible choices is “American Night,” an Italian-made American mob war/art swindling debacle that lured Jonathan Rhys Myers, Paz Vega, Emile Hirsch, Jeremy Piven and Michael Madsen with the promise of a working vacation in Italy.

But “working” for writer-director-hack Alessio Della Valle (“The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”) proves their undoing. The lurid, bloody, bullet-riddled fiasco he serves up here is the shiniest turd in the toilet — pretentious, slick, empty and stupid.

It doesn’t convince you it’s shot where it is set — New York and New Jersey. It doesn’t rope you into the fate of anyone — all these criminals, forgers, art experts and couriers caught up in the tangled tale of the stolen “Pink Marilyn” by Andy Warhol that is this story’s MacGuffin.

Rhys Myers, playing an art dealer and former forger in love-lust with an art restorer (Vega), gets to roll around in paint in the most colorful sex scene ever. He has the added privilege of uttering profundities like this — “Shalom, angel of death. Shalom, angel of fire. Shalom angel of peace.”

Vega? Her best lines might be shouting “JOHN” as he shouts “SARAH” back and forth with her several times at one point.

Piven plays a failing stunt man who finally almost masters the martial arts he’s supposed to know, the step-brother John eventually figures out somehow got the rolled-up painting in a gym-bag-at-the-bar mixup. Piven always looks as if he’s just taken his head out of his hands, struggling to hide his despair every time the word “AZIONE!” is shouted on set.

Hirsch shaved his head for this, just to play a spoiled heir to a Jersey mob family who thinks his spatter paintings — punctured by AK-47 rounds — should be hanging in the Met. It’s his dad’s Warhol painting that was stolen.

“My Marilyn — she’s coming home to me today. Like a woman who’s cheating on you, she always knows when she has to show up.”

Say what?

Madsen, playing a mobster, gets off lightly.

Fortunato Cerlino plays “Shakey,” a mob courier who misplays the whole painting hand-off thing partly thanks to the fact that the “Dead Rockstar Bar” (check out the bartenders — Joey Ramone, Prince, etc.) is hit by not one machine-gun armed gang, but two the same night.

Shakey has narcolepsy and dozes off in moments of stress. I found myself envying him, time and again.

A lot of things blow up, a lot of bullets are loosed and a few stunts are attempted and let’s just hope nobody got hurt making this.

So much blood, so much death — it’d be a shame if any of it was real, not that anything we see here is convincingly real, with or without the excruciating death scenes.

Let’s hope one and all enjoyed their paid Italian vacations.

Rating: R for violence, sexual content, nudity, and language throughout

Cast: Jonathan Rhys Myers, Paz Vega, Emile Hirsch, Jeremy Piven, Michael Madsen, Alba Amira and Fortunato Cerlino.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alessio Della Valle. A Lionsgate/Voltage/Saban release.

Running time: 2:04

Sidney Poitier, an Oscar winning icon of the cinema whose every early screen appearance was a dignified, fiery and eloquent appeal for equal rights and civil rights, and whose later years saw him as an elder statesman, an eminence grise of the screen, has died at the ripe old age of 94.

The first Black man to win an Oscar was also one of the greatest actors of his generation, something he proved over and over again during his years as a matinee idol.

“The Defiant Ones,” “In the Heat of the Night,” “Lilies of the Field,” “Blackboard Jungle,” “The Bedford Incident,” stage classic adaptations such as “Porgy and Bess,” “”A Raisin in the Sun,” comedies such as “Uptown Saturday Night” and “Let’s Do It Again,” this is the screen canon of a giant of his profession.

Authority figures, trailblazers, sex symbols and characters without compromise, often icons of “decency” on screen, he kept his classy image, even in lowdown comedies like “Uptown” and “Do It.”

His later acting years, with thrillers like “Little Nikita” and all-star romps like “Sneakers,” were like a decade long victory lap.

He will be remembered for 25 good to great films, and a life devoted to the cause of civil rights in his adoptive country, and around the world.

I met him a few times over the years, interviewing him for “Sneakers,” chatting up and his lifelong pal and fellow “islander” Harry Belafonte at the National Black Theater Festival in Winston Salem. Anybody warning you about not meeting your idols could shut up about Poitier. Old school, old Hollywood elegance incarnate, willing to share a BIG hearty laugh with — or about Belafonte — wholly aware of his “role model” status and never ever tarnishing it.

I distinctly remember the dirty look he gave me when I started in on a question quoting him baiting Belafonte over this or that, and both of them bursting into moist eyed laughter when they figured the white boy was in on their shared teasing.

Sidney Poitier was truly one of a kind.

“The Wasteland” or “The Beast (El páramo)” as it was originally-titled, is a Spanish period piece that inverts that classic horror trope of a mother doing anything to save her child from “evil.”

In a remote corner of 19th century Spain, doted-on-Diego (Asier Flores) eventually figures out that his mother (Inma Cuesta) is the one in real peril from this “Babadook” like “beast.”

The debut feature of direct/co-writer David Casademunt has an arresting, minimalist setting, a nerve-rattling moment or two and some decent performances. But it’s a slow slog of a thriller, playing much longer than its actual 93 minute running time.

A family of three is riding-out Spain’s troubled, war-wracked 19th century in a farm in a near-literal wasteland. The backlit trees are dead, their cabbage and corn are wilted and Salvador (Roberto Álamo) can barely keep them alive with the rabbits he raises.

It doesn’t help that little Diego is in the habit of treating them as pets. Dad’s “He needs to learn to be a man” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English) demands, handing the boy a bunny-bashing club, only send the kid running to the comfort of his mother.

Mother and child play games, share a bed and even baths. She tells Diego stories, some of them scary.

But when a bloodied, wounded stranger washes ashore in a boat on the edges of their land, and then kills himself in front of mother and child, Salvador tells his own story. It’s about “the beast.”

“No eyes fill the sockets of its face,” but it “still sees through you,” he warns. It’s another tale told to keep the kid in line, because “There are only bad people out there, people who hurt other people” beyond their land.

So what does Salvador do? He impulsively decides to take the body to “his family,” as if he knows them, as if leaving his own wife and son alone isn’t the worst idea anybody in any horror movie ever had.

That leaves mother and son to deal with the spooky sounds in the wind, Diego’s visions of Dad’s long-dead “beast” victim sister (Alejandra Howard) and Mom’s growing paranoia, firing the family shotgun into the darkness, or at nothing Diego can see in the broad daylight.

The kid’s jobs? Distract her. Reel her back into reality. Follow her instructions for fighting the beast, and learn how to bludgeon bunnies.

The bunny-bashing is one of several unpleasant things Casademunt flings at us. We see crude, spooky homemade dolls, and images of rotting fruit and animal carcasses decorate the setting as Mom despairs of her husband ever returning and Diego starts to figure out Mom’s what this beast wants next.

The slow pacing and elementary mistakes about how to frame, light, film and edit horror to make it shock and awe render this otherwise good-looking, stark and elemental thriller too bland to pay off.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, suicide

Cast: Inma Cuesta, Asier Flores, Roberto Álamo and Alejandra Howard

Credits: Directed by David Casademunt, scripted by David Casademunt, Martí Lucas and Fran Menchón. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33