Movies
‘Venus’ TIFF Review – Jaume Balagueró Gives Modern, Bloody Update to Lovecraft Story
Producer Álex de la Iglesia (The Day of the Beast) enlisted horror director Jaume Balagueró (REC, Sleep Tight) to helm the newest entry in his feature film series “The Fear Collection.” Balagueró teamed with Verónica scribe Fernando Navarro to co-write Venus, a blood-drenched and modern update to H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dreams in the Witch House.” A violent crime thriller gets applied to the Lovecraftian tale, presenting a compelling distraction for the cosmic horror to invade quietly.
Club dancer Lucía (Ester Expósito) abandons her platform mid-shift during peak hours to sneak into the back offices and swipe designer drugs from her corrupt employers. She gets caught by one of the enforcers and barely escapes with her life and the loot. Lucía, knowing the crime boss and his henchmen won’t rest until their stash is retrieved, retreats to the one place they won’t know to find her; with her estranged sister Rocío (Ángela Cremonte) and niece Alba (Inés Fernández). Tensions between the sisters are already rough, but then Rocío flees the decrepit apartment building, leaving Lucía alone with Alba in an increasingly strange apartment building.
Balagueró keeps Lucía’s messy drug theft predicament at the forefront, with subtle clues that something’s deeply amiss with the Venus building lurking in the background. She’s trapped there not just by the mafia’s dogged pursuit of her but by her sister’s seeming abandonment of Alba. It’s an effective means of prolonging the answers to the building’s most prominent mysteries and escalating the tension. Constant cuts to the mafia’s tactics in finding Lucía add a time crunch element as their search closes in like a noose around her neck.
Venus keeps everything so firmly rooted in the present that even Lucía’s rendered a bit vague. Enough details are given to paint her as a morally ambiguous protagonist with a checkered past. The sibling relationship between Lucía and Rocío isn’t developed enough for some of its emotional highs and lows to fully make an impact. However, both actors commit to the intensity regardless. Alba’s precociousness is more compelling; the adorable and intelligent young child convincingly provides a plausible motivator and emotional throughline for aunt Lucía.
In true Lovecraftian style, the horror comes slowly and vaguely, at least at first. Nightmares taunt Lucía at night, while Alba’s prophetic musings by day all signal a larger presence toying with the fates of Venus’s residents. The longer Lucía’s forced to remain within the building, the more the horror progresses. Wounds ooze and pulsate, self-mutilations induce wincing, and arterial spray escalates the terror from subtle to grotesque. The collision course between the mafia and the Venus tenants creates an explosive and satisfyingly gory third act.
Balagueró’s latest may draw from a familiar Lovecraft short, but its emphasis on the crime aspect puts it closer to a siege thriller than cosmic horror. Its mythology and character beats may be thinly drawn, but it doesn’t detract from the propulsive action sequences or gory moments. Expósito demonstrates her horror mettle as a resilient and determined heroine, especially in that breathless climax. Overall, Venus makes for a slick and breezy action-horror movie far more memorable for its gruesome high-octane thrills than its cosmic chills.
Venus made its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
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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