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Seeing isn’t always believing in The Chapel, the latest film from Piggy writer/director Carlota Pereda. Written by Pereda, as well as Albert Bertran Bas and Carmelo Viera, The Chapel is a supernatural drama about intergenerational trauma between mothers and their daughters.

The film opens in 1631 in a small Spanish town that is besieged by the Black Plague. Men in plague masks gather up sick individuals to lock them in the titular chapel to preserve the health of the community and, as the crowd watches, a young, infected Uxoa (Alba Hernández) is separated from her mother, who refuses to help.

The moment of familial discomfort is upended, however, when a member of the crowd raises a smartphone to shoot video of the event, shattering the authenticity of the moment. It turns out what we’re seeing is a historical reenactment: these are actors who are playing a part in an annual five day festival. Once a year the haunted church is opened up and the town becomes a debauchery-laden tourist destination.

A similar instance of visual questioning occurs only a few moments later when characters walk through town and arrive at a painted facade two-stories tall that mimics the real street behind it.

Because these moments are so close together – and occur so early in the film – it is clear that it’s a larger part of Pereda, Bas and Viera’s subtle agenda. The Chapel is clearly interested in exploring notions of life after death, spiritualism, and belief, but the screenwriters also seemingly want the audience to evaluate what we’re seeing and what constitutes truth.

The heroine of the film is young eight year old Emma (Maia Zaitegi), an aspiring medium who is bullied at school because it’s a well known fact that her mother (Loreto Mauleón) is dying of cancer. Although the woman is effectively in hospice, Emma can’t bear to be separated from her mother, so instead of being sent away to relatives or into foster care, Emma is regularly babysat by well-intentioned neighbors, Edurne (Elena Irureta) and Asier (Jon Olivares).

The kindly adults are no match for Emma’s strong will and her tendency to sneak out, however, so her de facto surrogate parent becomes police officer Jon Elorza (Josean Bengoetxea). He’s the one who typically finds Emma in the middle of the night, unaccompanied, and performing spells to try and speak with the spirit of Uxoa, who haunts the chapel.

The plot kicks in when Ivana Peralta (Nagore Aranburu), the old “witch” Emma was studying under, dies of natural causes on the eve of the festival. Concerned that if her mother dies during the five days, her spirit will be imprisoned inside the religious site, Emma befriends the witch’s daughter, Carol (Belén Rueda) who arrives in town to settle the estate and manage the funeral.

Rueda is eminently watchable as the scowling disbeliever with a tortured backstory. Carol makes a living as a fraudster mystic, she actively tells Emma she hates children, and she stalks through town in her mother’s fur coat like a fury. She also wears her history, quite literally, on her face: the entire left side is badly burned, a detail The Chapel mines for a narrative reveal in the last act.

The skeptical adult/precocious child partnership isn’t new, but it works exceptionally well here because both actors are great. Zaitegi is especially revelatory: the rare child actor who negotiates the fine line between cloying, annoying, and dangerously mature for their age. It’s the centerpiece performance of the film and it only works because Emma is inherently worth rooting for, even when she repeatedly sneaks out after dark, engages in risky spiritualist activities, and actively courts the attention of violent ghosts.

Alas the film loses its way roughly halfway through. While The Chapel makes a clear throughline between Uxoa, Carol, and Emma’s “abandonment” by their respective mothers, when it comes time to confront the literal ghosts of their past, there’s nothing else to explore. The climax is particularly muddled, as the aforementioned “question what you see” element comes roaring back in a poorly shot sequence featuring a fiery pyre. 

It’s even more disappointing considering the spectacle that Pereda creates only moments before: a mountain of mutilated plague bodies piled on top of each other. This is easily the most haunting visual in the entire film, but it stands out in stark contrast to earlier unconvincing CGI on the Plague Mask ghost that regularly attacks Emma.

Alas, it is the horror elements where The Chapel falls down. There’s more mood and tension in a scene when Carol stumbles drunk through the town in the middle of night than most of the overly familiar monster attack sequences. 

The film works best when it is investigating the nature of female relationships between Emma, her mother, and Carol or when it explores Emma’s inability to process her mother’s impending death (fans of J.A. Bayona’s A Monster Calls will find this to be a suitable companion piece). 

As a female-centric drama with genre-adjacent tones, this is a strong calling card for Pereda’s talent. As a horror film, though? The Chapel is muddled.

The Chapel made its North American debut at the Fantasia International Film Festival.