Adivina Quién Soy (A Real Friend)

[susanreads]

This a short Spanish made-for-TV movie, part of a series "Películas Para no Dormir" (Films to Keep You Awake), which I recorded off-air last year (remember I said I had a backlog?). I make the Spanish title out to mean "Guess Who I Am"; according to the listing, the title of the subtitled version "A Real Friend" refers to Estrella's imaginary friend who might be a real vampire. I'm pretty sure they're confusing two characters, but there is a lot of intentional misdirection in this film.

After the opening clip from what might be a fictional horror movie, the film is focussed on Estrella, a schoolgirl who lives with her mother in a present-day urban block of flats and is a Stephen King fan; her mother; and her imaginary friends - or are they? Puzzles build up about what's actually going on, interspersed with several reveals, where some of the interpretations we've been invited to make are invalidated.

Every man in the film gets at least one moment of being regarded with suspicion (by the camera, not by Estrella who seems at several points to be trusting people she shouldn't); I'm sure it's not just my acquired mistrust of vampire hunters that makes that guy with the rosary wrapped round his gun hand look sinister. And there were times when I wondered whether Estrella's subconscious was running things, like a poltergeist.

There's another thing going on that I found even more interesting, but talking about it is going to be spoilery, so:

Spoilers Regret the Ending
You know how, in horror movies, disfigured people are always villains? This one features several traditional horror-movie monsters (in appearance), particularly the one with the bandaged face, who Estrella refers to as "a huge monster" (we can't tell at first whether anyone else can see him). Her attitude seems to be that monsters are also people. There's another man she addresses as Vampiro (Vampire), because she thinks he looks like her Nosferatu figurine, but apart from some lighting effects he looks like a regular guy.

The interesting thing about that is, it's the regular guy who's a multiple murderer, whether he's also a supernatural creature or not; when the thriller plot reaches its most dangerous point, it's disfigured-bandaged-guy who comes charging to the rescue, with his chainsaw and his horror-movie monster allies.

Final twist:
Then the twist in the final shot disappointed me, by invalidating my preferred interpretation (as a genre fan, though I don't usually like horror) of everything since the opening clip. It seemed like a massive cop-out, explaining everything that didn't need to be explained; in a horror movie, real-world plausibility issues are not applicable, you know? It's occurred to me since that we might be supposed to wonder what's going on under the surface in that household, to put such things in Estrella's head, but she's a genre fan! No further explanation is necessary!

I've looked it up on IMDB since, and ... maybe the reviewers on there were watching a different cut. Has anyone else seen it?

(edited to fix something I misheard and change the time - it originally posted as 16:59, so it must have taken me over an hour to write this. This is why I don't post much.)