Crisálida

Fernando Navarro (Malaventura) returns with a dark fable that explores the nature of faith in a bloody and desolate south. A wild family drama where mysticism and psychedelia are masterfully mixed. The girl Nada opens her eyes in a bed in a sanatorium where she does not know how she got there. The memories, nightmares and dreams caused by drugs take her to an earlier time, when her parents took her, along with her four brothers, to live in a redwood forest lost somewhere between the Alpujarras of Granada and Sierra Nevada. There, little by little, violence and madness take over her entire family, especially her father, nicknamed the Captain, a tormented and paranoid man for whom Nada feels a strange fascination. Besieged by a disturbing presence that lives in the heart of the forest, the girl learns to grow up in the middle of a nature as alive as it is hostile, as strange as it is dangerous. Half folk horror, half coming-of-age novel, Crisálida constructs a unique, lysergic and evocative southern literary territory in which humor and violence go hand in hand to tell a moving story of childhood abandonment and helplessness that draws as much from the exploration of family terror by Shirley Jackson and Stephen King as from the father-son dramas of the films of Víctor Erice or Carlos Saura.