When high school English teacher Elena Vera begins experiencing terrifying hallucinations and recurring nightmares of a demonic elderly woman, she fears she's losing her grip on reality. But after a horrifying incident at school leads to her forced medical leave, Elena discovers something far more sinister is at work. With the help of her best friend Carrie and student Maria, Elena uncovers a generations-old curse that has plagued her family.
The demonic entity known as la vieja malvada - the evil old woman - has returned to claim Elena's soul, just as it did when she was a child in Ecuador. As the supernatural attacks escalate and a mysterious black fungus spreads across her apartment, Elena's only hope lies in an excommunicated priest named Tomas, who carries his own demons from a failed exorcism that cost a young boy his life.
Racing against time as the entity's power grows stronger, Elena and her unlikely allies must confront both personal fears and an ancient evil in a desperate battle for her very soul. But even as divine intervention offers a chance at salvation, a chilling epilogue suggests that some evils can never truly be banished.
This was a fantastic offering with a lot to like about it. The central setup involves the exploration of this decades-long curse against this family and how it's manifesting in the current day, with the targeting of the teacher in a series of supernatural attacks that set the tone immediately. Dropping us quickly into the idea of her intense and vibrant nightmares influenced by the particular figure and turning it into a series of interactions with her and her friends trying to make sense of the different hallucinations that she experiences is a great way to introduce everything. This provides the necessary backstory on the nature of the curse and what is happening to her while also getting enough on her friends trying to help her once they start to believe that she's being affected by the entity, since that provides the impetus for the creature to turn on them in a series of chilling and terrifying attacks.
The final half, where it finally becomes apparent that something is happening to her and it requires the presence of the exorcist to fully cleanse her, offers a lot to like, even if it does also generate a few minor, barely negligible drawbacks. With the big confrontation being a major selling point where they start to interact with the demonic figure controlling her bringing about a slew of general trauma and painful backgrounds to inflict psychological torture on those around her attempting to figure out how to save her that offers the introduction of the actual entity which goes deep into Latin culture for what the entity is about and why it's after her and her family. This is all impressively handled with a zippy, breezy energy that makes the dark tone feel quite earned and intriguing as it goes along, diving deep into the characters to make them likable despite how familiar it all handles the action. It hits the expected beats when it starts to dip into the exorcism scenes by being part of the genre format, but it's the only real issue against this one.
5/5
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