Movies
[SFF ’15 Review] ‘Shrew’s Nest’ Is Bloody, Bold, and Tragic
All I knew when I sat down for Shrew’s Nest was that it was produced by the always-interesting Álex de la Iglesia (Witching & Bitching, The Last Circus) and that the Stanley Festival folks had compared it to Misery. Well shit, that’s all I needed to hear. The debut feature of Juanfer Andrés and Esteban Roel, Shrew’s Nest is a wicked little film about family ties and the painful constraints of memory. What starts out as a devilish family drama between two sisters transforms into a mad grasp for desperate companionship on one side and straight up survival on the other.
Set sometime in the 1950s, the film centers around Montse (Macarena Gomez) who lives with her younger sister Hermana (Nadia de Santiago), who has just turned 18. The sisters’ morbid family history consists of a dead mother and a father who bounced after the funeral. Since then, Montse has suffered from crippling agoraphobia – one foot out of their apartment door and she’s ready to explode. Hermana, on the other hand, is ready for romance and to shake off the domineering constraints her sister has created.
But maybe Montse is ready for a flame of her own too. And maybe she’s willing to do something drastic to make someone love her. Montse’s slapdash scheme to nail down a lover is the catalyst for the vicious unraveling of her and Hermana’s relationship. The final half of Shrew’s Nest is as wildly suspenseful with a suffocating atmosphere that nearly chokes its audience out.
[Related Posts] Read All Stanley Film Festival Reviews Right Here!
Some films try to lazily crank up the tension by making the affair inexplicably claustrophobic – condensing the story to a taught location with little explanation. Shrew’s Nest ain’t that lazy mother though. The film delivers one of the most organic takes on claustrophobia in recent memory – giving a thorough and wholly believable explanation for Montse’s agoraphobia. She can’t leave the apartment, so the whole shebang takes place within its cramped walls.
What really sells the drama is Macarena Gomez and Nadia de Santiago’s performances. These two lady leads are passionately versatile as they run a 90 minute marathon of emotions that ranges from sincerely empathetic to bat out of infierno. Montse is a deeply multi-dimensional villain that viewers will find themselves inadvertently rooting for from time to time – only to be disgusted with her the next second. It’s these kind of emotional layers that make Shrew’s Nest a massive step above the rest.
It’s a mesmerizing, sinister drama to watch play out – the audience bares witness as a seemingly nurturing environment absolutely loses its mind in a fury of violence. All the while, Juanfer Andrés and Esteban Roel show themselves to be masters of their craft – from the brutal imagery to the depth of character. It’s hard to comprehend that this is their first feature. It’s just so goddamn well crafted, well acted, and downright gripping.
Shrew’s Nest (aka Musarañas) is currently working the festival circuit. We’ll bring you release news as it comes along.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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