One random Plex recommendation, one intriguing poster and a Spanish horror film that starts with stolen ecstasy before wandering into witchcraft, cosmic horror and something resembling divine intervention.
Spoilers throughout. I discuss the whole film, including the ending, although discussing it and actually making sense of it turned out to be two different things.
Another Evening, Another Random Plex Recommendation
One of the things I like about Plex is how it occasionally throws something at me that I wasn’t looking for. No carefully researched watchlist, no trailer I’ve been waiting months to see. Just a film appearing on screen, accompanied by artwork that makes me wonder whether it’s worth a couple of hours. That is more or less how I ended up watching Venus (2022), the Spanish horror film directed by Jaume Balagueró.
The poster did most of the convincing. Ester Expósito looking battered and bloodied, an ominous eclipse and a general suggestion that something dreadful was about to happen. I knew very little about the story before pressing play, which is probably why its extraordinary change of direction took me by surprise. By the time the credits rolled, I had progressed from understanding the predicament of a nightclub dancer on the run to wondering about ancient gods, three elderly witches and a heroine who apparently becomes a supernatural force herself.
I stayed with it for the full hundred minutes, which must count for something. Whether I could explain everything I’d just watched was quite another matter.
A Bag of Ecstasy and a Very Bad Escape Plan
Lucía, played by Ester Expósito, is a dancer at a Madrid nightclub. She decides to steal a bag full of ecstasy tablets from the people running the place, who happen to be criminals rather than particularly understanding employers. As escape plans go, this one doesn’t stand up to even casual inspection. She’s discovered, stabbed in the leg and forced to flee with the drugs while losing a considerable amount of blood.
Going to hospital would mean answering awkward questions, so she heads for the flat of her estranged sister Rocío, played by Ángela Cremonte. Up to this point I thought I knew roughly what sort of film I was watching: a nasty little crime thriller about an impulsive theft and the people determined to retrieve their property. It was familiar but effective, with sufficient momentum to keep me interested.
Finding Refuge in the Venus Building
Rocío lives with her daughter Alba, played by Inés Fernández, in a deteriorating apartment block on the outskirts of Madrid. The timing of Lucía’s arrival is peculiar because Rocío and Alba appear to be getting ready to leave. Rocío isn’t pleased to see her sister, particularly when the unexpected visitor is injured and carrying a bag of stolen drugs. Their relationship is plainly strained, and the film hints at a history of neglect and resentment without stopping to unpack every grievance.
What I liked here was the building itself. It looks tired in a way that feels plausible: narrow corridors, awkward rooms, uninviting common areas and that particularly depressing atmosphere of a place whose better days were never especially good. Residents continue living there because, presumably, they have reasons not to leave. Before the ghosts, witches or cosmic entities show themselves, the location already feels unpleasant.
There’s something effective about placing ancient evil inside an entirely ordinary residential building. No gothic castle, no conveniently isolated monastery, no picturesque village with a suspicious festival. Just neighbours, corridors and noises from the floors above. Most of us have had a neighbour who seemed a bit strange. Usually the worst they do is drag furniture across the tiles at midnight.
Lucía, Rocío and Alba: The Family Story That Actually Works
Rocío’s disappearance leaves Lucía responsible for Alba, and their uneasy relationship gradually becomes the part of the story I could actually hold on to. Lucía doesn’t suddenly become an ideal aunt. She’s wounded, suspicious and far too preoccupied with her own problems to be particularly good company for a frightened child. Her instinct is still largely to look after herself.
Expósito makes the gradual change believable. She begins as someone who has made a selfish decision, then slowly discovers that protecting Alba matters more than recovering from her injuries or escaping with the drugs. Inés Fernández gives Alba enough presence that she feels like more than an object the villains happen to want. The relationship isn’t especially subtle, but at least the emotional stakes remain understandable while everything around them grows increasingly peculiar.
Three Elderly Women Who Really Shouldn’t Be Trusted
Then there are the older women in the building. Marga, played by Magüi Mira, emerges as the most prominent of three neighbours whose ordinary appearance conceals considerably more sinister interests. They’re involved in occult rituals, and their plans for Alba suggest that they regard human suffering as a minor administrative inconvenience in pursuit of a much grander objective.
I liked this idea. Mira is most effective when Marga behaves less like a theatrical movie witch and more like someone handling a necessary household task. The calmness is what makes it disturbing. The women don’t need pointed hats, dramatic speeches or much in the way of obvious villainy; their familiar faces and unhurried manner do most of the work.
What frustrated me was how little sense of history they were given. How long have they been in the building? What brought them into the cult? What do they genuinely know about the being they’re trying to summon? Perhaps not knowing is supposed to be frightening, but I wanted a little more about the women themselves, not another fragment of mystical information that would make even less sense later.
The Dreams, the Servant and the Horror Upstairs
Alba experiences disturbing dreams and refers to a strange presence linked to the upper reaches of the building, commonly called the Servant. There are ominous visions, unsettling gifts and a growing sense that dreaming and waking are no longer separate states. Rocío’s disappearance only deepens that uncertainty, leaving Lucía to investigate events while trying to keep her niece away from the people who seem to know far too much.
These sections are often effective in the moment. I liked the idea of a child noticing that something is wrong long before the adults are willing or able to understand it. But the film keeps layering one element over another, and I began to wonder which clues I was actually expected to remember. The Servant, the witches, the dreams, the ritual and the astronomical event all sound connected, although the connections never became particularly clear to me.
Apparently, This Is Lovecraft
Only afterwards did I discover that Venus draws loosely on H. P. Lovecraft’s 1933 story The Dreams in the Witch House. The original follows Walter Gilman, a mathematics student whose investigations into strange geometry, witchcraft and impossible dimensions lead him into a nightmarish world beyond ordinary understanding. Balagueró and co-writer Fernando Navarro keep the broad ingredients of a sinister building, witches, dreams and an unearthly presence but shift the story into contemporary Spain, replacing the original protagonist with a dancer fleeing criminals.
That background helped me appreciate what the film was attempting, although it didn’t miraculously explain its ending. Lovecraftian horror generally derives its power from the sense that our familiar problems are trivial compared with the enormous forces existing outside human experience. Here, those forces sometimes feel more like another problem waiting for Lucía at the end of an already dreadful evening.
Balagueró’s Background and the Machinery Behind the Film
Jaume Balagueró is best known internationally as a co-director of [REC] (2007), the Spanish found-footage horror film that made an apartment building into one of the least appealing places on earth. In that respect, Venus returns him to familiar territory. The film was written by Balagueró and Fernando Navarro and produced under The Fear Collection banner, associated with Álex de la Iglesia, Carolina Bang, Pokeepsie Films and Sony Pictures.
It screened at Sitges in 2022 and reached Spanish cinemas that December. Pablo Rosso handled the cinematography, Luis de la Madrid the editing, and the production music credits include Vanessa Garde and Arnau Batallé. The project clearly has experienced horror filmmakers behind it, and you can see that in the confident staging even when the screenplay starts heading in several directions at once.
The Design Is More Convincing Than the Mythology
I thought the visuals were considerably stronger than the explanations. The nightclub is all artificial illumination, movement and noise, with the kind of energy that can disguise a great deal of trouble until it is too late. The apartment is the opposite: cramped, still, decaying and full of corners from which something might be observing you. Both spaces are dangerous, but their threats are entirely different.
Rosso’s lighting keeps faces half-obscured and domestic spaces threatening, while the makeup and physical effects give Lucía’s ordeal a harsh, unpleasant texture. The film is good at making injuries matter visually. She doesn’t glide through danger looking immaculate, and by the end she appears to have survived two or three different horror films without being allowed a change of clothes.
The score and sound design add to the unease, although the film occasionally seems determined to underline the significance of events its screenplay hasn’t really established. I generally prefer horror that trusts a disturbing image to do its own work. Venus often has the image; it just doesn’t always know when to stop explaining things around it.
The Criminals Return, Oblivious to Everything Else
The stolen drugs never quite disappear from the plot. Lucía’s pursuers eventually find their way back into the story, and the film shifts again towards violent survival thriller territory. I didn’t mind that in itself. The men are threatening in recognisable, physical ways, and there’s a certain dark amusement in watching ordinary criminal intimidation collide with supernatural events beyond anyone’s pay grade.
Lucía responds with increasing desperation and resourcefulness, which makes the final act unexpectedly energetic. The problem is that the crime story and the witches’ elaborate scheme are both demanding the film’s full attention. At times I felt I was watching two competing plots, each convinced that it was the main attraction.
A Child Sacrifice, an Eclipse and the End of My Understanding
As the ritual approaches, the witches’ intentions for Alba become clear enough: the child is needed for a ceremony connected with the supernatural presence they worship. The coming eclipse provides the occasion for something ancient and terrifying to cross into the human world. Rocío’s fate has added urgency, while Lucía is now determined to stop the women regardless of the injuries she’s accumulated.
All of that I could just about follow. But the mythology surrounding the entity, called Lamaasthu in the film, and the language of pain, light and transformation became less and less comprehensible as the action accelerated. The ritual imagery is striking. The precise cosmic rules governing it remained, to me at least, a complete mystery.
Queen of Pain, Bringer of Light — Sorry, What?
By the climax, the film seems to suggest that Lucía is not simply an intruder disrupting the witches’ ritual. She has somehow become the central figure in a supernatural transformation. The women appear to recognise in her something that may be connected to the entity they intended to summon, yet the relationship remains conspicuously vague.
Is Lucía the goddess they were calling? Is she an entirely different manifestation, one brought into being by her suffering and refusal to sacrifice Alba? Was she always destined for this role, or did she accidentally overturn their plans? I’m not sure. The eclipse happens, the imagery becomes increasingly grand and Lucía emerges with an almost divine authority, having defeated the witches and protected her niece.
There is a symbolic reading that I can appreciate. A young woman who began by stealing from dangerous men and thinking only of herself has been transformed by suffering into someone capable of protecting another person. A child meant to be sacrificed survives because her aunt refuses to abandon her. The idea is coherent enough as an emotional arc, but the supernatural mechanism delivering it never quite convinced me.
When Symbolism Starts Doing the Plot’s Homework
I don’t need every supernatural detail explained. Some films work best when they leave room for ambiguity, and I have no objection to an ending that continues rattling around in my head afterwards. But there’s a difference between an unknowable cosmic presence and a plot that hasn’t given me enough information to recognise what has changed.
Venus introduces dreams, an entity, three witches, a child sacrifice, a missing sister, an eclipse and a criminal underworld. The ending demands that all these things converge in Lucía’s transformation. I understood what the moment was trying to feel like; I was far less certain how the film had earned it. Instead of being overwhelmed by cosmic terror, I found myself wondering whether I’d missed several pages of exposition somewhere around the middle.
What Worked, and What Didn’t
I did like Expósito’s commitment to the role. Her performance is physical, unglamorous when necessary and convincing enough to keep me interested through the more preposterous developments. Mira is another strength, along with the sheer unpleasant ordinariness of the building. The atmosphere frequently works, and there is some satisfying horror imagery along the way.
The weakness is the writing. Rocío’s relationship with her sister feels underdeveloped, the witches could have used more individual identity and the mythology is frustratingly hard to separate from the symbolism. It isn’t that the ideas are uninteresting; there are simply too many of them competing for space. At a certain point, the film seems more interested in presenting a grand transformation than ensuring that I understand why it is happening.
Plex Suggested It. I Watched It. I’m Still Puzzled.
I wouldn’t call Venus a complete failure. It has an effective opening, an oppressive setting, capable performers and a few properly unsettling moments. I can also see why somebody with a greater appetite for chaotic occult horror might enjoy it considerably more than I did. I stuck with it because there was always the possibility that the next scene would finally bring the strands together.
That never quite happened. I liked Lucía’s growing responsibility towards Alba and the wonderfully sinister old neighbours, but I finished the film without being able to say what, exactly, Lucía had become. Perhaps that was the point. Perhaps it wasn’t. All I know is that Plex offered me a random Spanish horror film, I followed the intriguing poster, and somehow ended up watching a nightclub dancer become a crowned, bloodied bringer of cosmic light.
At least the algorithm got me to watch something I wouldn’t otherwise have chosen. Whether that counts as a recommendation or a warning is another matter.
My rating: 2½ out of 5 stars.
Film and production references
Production and cast details: Sony Pictures España; Spanish ICAA film catalogue; RTVE interview with Jaume Balagueró. The two embedded promotional videos are published by Sony Pictures España.
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