Directors: Raúl Cerezo and Fernando González Gómez
artists: Gustavo Salmerón, Zorion Eguileor and Irene Anula
Premiere: Friday, March 17, 2023
★★
One growing thread in recent horror cinema centers on aging and the shadows it casts. In a year when other titles like Relic from 2020 or The Dark and the Wicked from the same period explored frailty, memory, and the slow erasure that time can bring, Viejos (The Old Men) adds its own, sharper voice to the conversation. It marks the second collaboration between Raúl Cerezo and Fernando González Gómez, and while it riffs on familiar fears about aging, it also refuses to orbit that theme in a safe, familiar orbit. Instead, it nudges the audience toward a more uncomfortable question: what happens when the fear of getting old becomes a verb you act out rather than a condition you endure?
The film opens with a bold, almost theatrical certainty. It has a brisk energy that punctures the quiet dread it builds, creating a balance between dark humor and genuine menace. The premise leans into a playful irreverence: aging is not merely a state of the body but a landscape of social expectations, habits, and stubborn routines that creep into every room of a house and every frame of a life. The directors show a flair for staging that foregrounds atmosphere, using settings that feel both historically charged and intensely intimate. Buildings, walls, staircases—each element seems anchored in memory, as if the past is a living character that won’t stop whispering warnings.
The cast anchors the film with a steadiness that keeps the tonal shifts from collapsing into chaos. Gustavo Salmerón, Zorion Eguileor, and Irene Anula deliver performances that are at once restrained and ferociously expressive. The dialogues carry a sly humor, a nimble playful back-and-forth that never softens the film’s darker impulses. The script leans on observation as a tool for suspense, letting small miscommunications and misread signals pile up until they form a pressure cooker of mood rather than a string of jump scares. In this sense, Viejos favors a patient build, inviting viewers to notice the texture of every room—the creaky floorboards, the off-kilter lighting, the way a chair seems to groan under the weight of a collective memory.
The premise may be familiar, but the execution feels singular. The film avoids relying on obvious shocks or cheap frights, instead choosing a clinical, almost documentary-like focus on character dynamics. It is in the micro-interactions—the way someone moves a cup, the hesitation before a door latch clicks shut—that the movie earns its tension. Yet there is a notable misstep: some sequences drift into a kind of exaggerated roughness that undermines the intended offense and veers into ugliness rather than discomfort. When a joke lands, it lands hard; when it doesn’t, the moment sits there, inert, as if the film forgot to tell us how to feel.
Still, Viejos marks a clear artistic progression for the director duo compared with their earlier work, most notably La pasajera from 2021. The shift is visible in the meticulousness of the craft: the settings feel more coherent, the pacing more deliberate, and the tonal balance steadier. The atmosphere is punctuated by a sense of warmth in the writing, a quality that makes the story’s emotional pulse feel organic rather than manufactured. The film’s world feels lived-in: a place where time presses in from all sides, yet the characters stubbornly insist on continuing with their routines, even as the weight of what lies ahead grows heavier.
The storytelling is anchored by a sensibility that respects audience intelligence. There is room for interpretation, and the end does not attempt to force a single reading. It is an ending that satisfies because it is earned, not because it is spectacular. Even if the final act does not close every door with perfect neatness, it delivers a resolution that resonates with the film’s central concern: aging is not a spectacle to be feared only in the abstract, but a lived experience that shapes choices, relationships, and the very way a home feels.
In sum, Viejos stands as a notable entry in modern Spanish-language horror, one that threads humor and dread through a carefully constructed atmosphere. It challenges the audience to consider the social and personal dimensions of aging without retreating into cliché. The movie is not a flawless triumph, but its ambition is clear, and its execution demonstrates a confident command of mood, character, and locale. It may not redefine the genre, but it certainly expands its boundaries, offering a film that lingers in the mind long after the credits roll and invites viewers to reexamine what scares them most about growing older.