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Synopsis: Claudia's daughter, Angela, has been kidnapped. The police find a mutilated body matching her description, but the body has had identifying parts like teeth and fingers removed. The only thing that remains to suggest it is Angela is the bones of her left leg, which is shorter than the right and requires a brace. The police are sure of the identity, but Claudia is never shown the body. Five years later, she receives a phone call from someone claiming to be Angela. Angela, it seems, was kidnapped by a cult called "The Nameless," who submit their identities to the cause of bringing evil into the world as a palpable force. With the aid of the policeman who originally found the body, Claudia penetrates into the netherworld of this cult, only to find a ghastly surprise waiting for her.

Between this film and Darkness, neither much liked by fans inside or out of the genre, Jaume Balagueró sets forth a bleak, bleak worldview in which the possibility of the triumph of evil is supplanted entirely by its complete and implacable inevitability. Whether or not this worldview comes from Balagueró himself or from Ramsey Campbell's source novel is open to debate, I guess, but given the common thread through both of Balagueró's horror movies, I would suggest that it is his own worldview, and that Campbell attracted the director through a sympathy of interests. It is entirely possible that the lack of a director with the same kind of philosophy of horror is the reason that Campbell had never been filmed prior to this film. The gift displayed by Campbell in his novels is the translocation of vast Lovecraftian horrors into the internal lives of dysfunctional people, which is a very subjective kind of horror. This suggests the reason why Campbell has not attracted the interests of filmmakers. Certainly, some of his work is completely unfilmable, but Balagueró is able to translate some of Campbell's modus operandi into this movie relatively intact.

The style Balagueró uses in this film is superficially similar to David Fincher's, but whereas Fincher trades in a trendy, surface nihilism, Balagueró's films feel it in their bones. Balagueró makes no concession in this movie to horror movie commonplaces (contrast this with his subsequent film, in which a plethora of horror movie clichés are used as an elaborate ruse). Any hint of self-awareness or ironic commentary or comedy relief would derail the film, and Balagueró knows it. Instead, there is a steady layering-on of dread, a building premonition that the worst is just around the corner. The film's denouement might seem an anticlimax to an audience expecting a violent struggle between good and evil, or the assertion of natural maternal and fillial love in the face of evil, but that's not this film at all. The finale, like the rest of the film, offers more implications than outright statements. The end result is a bad trip, a film that is neither reassuring or conventionally thrilling, but one that stays with you as you try to figure out the grand scheme of its ending.

1/3/06.