La Influencia (The Influence) [2019]

Rating: Thumbs Down 👎

I know I don't post here often, but sometimes a movie is so bad I am honestly left with no choice but to get out of bed to get my laptop to write out my feelings. 

First, the movie's opening credits involve a 3D tarantula, I do not like spiders, at all, like a normal person. I wish there was some kind of spider warning tag on this film because they are shown throughout and then I feel like spiders are crawling on me. So if you are a serious arachnophobe I recommend skipping this for that reason alone. 

I guess I should give you some backstory, or plot points really, so you can understand my ramblings. This movie is about two sisters taking care of their comatose witch mother, and the one sister's daughter being a moron. 

The oldest daughter is named Alicia, she is a nurse and she moved away and never wanted to come back to the house. She is married to someone who is really not important and they have a daughter named Nora. 

The youngest sister is named Sara, she seems to own some kind of haberdashery in town and lives in a small cottage, she is single and was taking care of their mother before she fell into the coma - after she fell into the coma she called Alicia and asked her to come help. 

Nora is a ten-year-old girl, she for some reason wants to see the grandma even though she has never met her or her aunt 🤷.

Victoria is their mother who is in a coma, the whole village seems to know that she's a wacko witch.

There is a cousin named Fran, he is only shown in a couple scenes, a flashback and a will reading. I only mention him because some things later in the film involve him and quite frankly it is unclear to me as to why. 

As Nora explores this three-story, very dirty home, she finds a spider locket in the drawer of an old sewing machine. After she leaves the room the sewing machine goes crazy and the door shuts on its own. If it's supposed to be the witch grandma it was never shown in any flashbacks that Victoria was a fucking avid seamstress, so it is a useless scare to show that something has been awakened. Nora seems to communicate with the grandma and cuts a lock of her hair off to put in the locket. 

Victoria apparently bought a bulk shipment of these lockets from AliExpress (not sponsored) because she has one for each of her daughters and randomly Fran. 

Nora begins to see a child, clearly a ghost, who says her name is Luna but it is really Victoria. Nora appears at the house and at Nora's school - keying cars outside the classroom window and killing the village electrician causing a village-wide blackout so her father can take the job and they won't leave the spooky house too soon, because at this point Alicia wants to get the fuck out of there. 

Alicia decides it would be a good idea to burn her all her mom's witchcraft items, she makes her husband and Sara help. A goat skull survives the fire (it will have symbolism later on, besides the obvious witchcraft element). Luna shows up and takes the goat skull out of the ashes and takes it who knows where. 

Victoria is very pissed her daughters did this, even though earlier in the day Alicia turned off her breathing machine and Sara tried to stop her from murdering her. 

Luckily Nora was expelled from school for a couple days for beating the shit out of her classmate who made fun of her "weird bat grandma." Nora is obviously grounded, but her dad allows her into the garden when she goes there she meets her friend Luna. 

Nora and Luna go to Sara's house and are waiting for her to return from work. Sara is obviously confused as to how Nora got in and then Luna chimes in that they came through the back door. Luna/Victoria makes Sara dig her own grave and a small fight ensues - Sara tries dragging Luna into the grave and then Luna calls for Nora to help. Nora whacks her aunt with a shovel and she lets go of Luna's legs. Luna is not impressed as Sara is still alive and tries to get Nora to finish the job, when she doesn't she transforms into her older self and smashes Sara's face in with the shovel. They cover the hole and plant flowers over it somehow with enough time for Nora to make it home and complete some kind of "look into my eyes" ritual with Victoria. 

Alicia (and husband) are freaking out looking for their runaway child, they even made a police report, and when they return home she's just there cleaning sand off the stairs. So far it's not that confusing, though I don't know why it was necessary to kill Sara. Sara was just living her own life and taking care of her comatose mother.

I guess Alicia noticed her sister seemed to be missing so the whole gang went to the house to look for clues to her whereabouts. Nora sees a dog go out to the fresh soil and goes to tell it to go away, when it doesn't she kicks him. Alicia sees this and goes to yell at Nora but the husband shows up and says he's going to the police station to make a report of Sara's disappearance and Nora happily volunteers to go along with him. 

Later that night, a seemingly possessed by Victoria Nora, drags an ax from their house to Sara's house without anyone seeing to murder the dog - I obviously did not enjoy this scene as I am not a fan of animal cruelty and it wasn't really necessary. In fact wouldn't it give the police more evidence? Though I must say them seem to be pretty incompetent police, Sara is never mentioned again and Nora never tells her parents that she killed her aunt so I guess she is still a missing person? 

So let's just get to my problems and confusion with this film. Alicia has finally figured out that Nora is somehow possessed by her mother, and during dinner, decided to tell the story about how her father died. We get a flashback to a white witch Victoria making some spells in the kitchen when her husband comes home, they start to get it on in the kitchen when a young Alicia wearing the goat skull shows up at the door. He decided to follow her much to Victoria's dismay. He comes across Sara and asks where Alicia is and she smiles towards the door that leads to the basement. On the staircase is the goat skull and Alicia is under the stairs waiting to grab his ankles to give him a scare, too bad it goes horribly wrong and he falls and lands neck first into the antler of the goat skull. Alicia says that he traveled a lot and that they only wanted him to pay attention to them and said that it was an accident because they were playing. I feel a lot of this could have been resolved with some really could family therapy.

So, essentially we find out that Alicia is an accidental father murdering asshole, Sara was an accomplice, and Victoria blames her daughters for losing the love of her life. It was said after his death that she turned more towards black magic or dark magic - they never really say but from the flashback of her in white and being ethereal to black veils and smoked out eyes it pretty easy to follow the clues. 

When everyone is out of the house Alicia goes into her mother's room to open a wardrobe that the mother had hidden the key for, she uses a butter knife and it opens pretty easily. Inside is the white dress covered that she wore the day the husband died and has his blood on it and a box engraved with snakes, which you would think would be spiders since her obsession, but whatever. 

Inside the snake box were four lockets. One held Sara's tooth, Victoria somehow pulled it out with her barehand when she was a child. The second held Alicia's toenail, Victoria ripped it out in a weird flashback. In the third locket was Fran's finger - this is where my issues are really starting to come out. The point of the lockets is so that Victoria can control the person whose body part is in it, why did she need to control Fran? He slept over once as a child and from the flashback it didn't seem like a fun sleepover so I doubt his parents let him go back there. There is really no other information about why Fran was important enough to have his own locket, he's essentially a throwaway character, he added nothing to the story and really didn't need to be there at all. The last locket had Nora's hair in there, which at least she put in by herself and didn't have to maim any body parts. 

Some shit ensues and everyone ends up at the hospital. For some reason, Alicia is 100% confident that Victoria is no longer in Nora and can't harm anyone else, which is naive because Victoria is obviously a very powerful witch. They then cut to a hooked up to things Nora, she may be in a coma, who knows, but her spirit walks to Victoria's room. She shows up with her grandpa behind her and tells Victoria that she needs to be who she wants to be and that she needs to let go and be with grandpa in heaven where it feels like walking on sand. At this point I have to call bullshit - this woman tortured her children when they were younger and then murdered her daughter as an adult and also was a legit witch there's no way she was ever going to make it to heaven - so shame on Nora for being a fucking moron. 

After her little speech, the grandma turns into a freaky flesh goat head demon with weird teeth and Victoria grabs her neck so the demon can enter her? Not real clear on those details. Nora wakes up to her parents and says that she loves them and has missed them. Clearly, Nora is not possessed and everything is going to be normal again.

The ending sequence goes like this, we lock the house door, pack up the car and start driving off. Nora does this finger dragging thing on the car seat which is something Victoria did in the hospital bed, meaning that Nora isn't Nora, Nora is Victoria. They also show two missing person's posters. One for Sara, which means no one found her body and Alicia obviously doesn't give a fuck about her sister, and another flier for a young girl whose name was like Marie or Meg but it is a picture of Luna. They then show Marie/Meg floating in the well in backyard garden of the house. 

Who the hell was the child? Why did Victoria kill her? Why would she take the form of a child? Victoria never met Nora, and it didn't seem like Alicia was ever speaking to her mother so how would she know she needed to kill a child in order to take her form? Nora didn't even know who Sara was when they first got to the house so I don't believe all this pre-planning. It just seemed like a random fuck you to the viewer to throw in unless Marie/Meg is getting a movie as a prequel to this because it's not like it answered why Victoria was showing up as her to Nora. I mean Marie/Meg is literally on the cover of this movie, just tell me her backstory, no one would be putting up a missing person flyer if there was no one who cared about her. 

But seriously why Fran, what was the point.