Crew
Director – Victor Garcia, Screenplay – Guillem Clua, Story – Victor Garcia & Alberto Marini, Producers – Mercedes Gamero & Edmon Roch, Photography – Jose Luis Bernal, Music – Marc Timon, Visual Effects – Onirikal Studio (Supervisor – Luis Tincado), Special Effects Supervisor – Esther Ballasteros, Makeup Effects – DDT (Supervisors – David Marti & Montse Ribe), Production Design – Marc Pou. Production Company – Atresmedia Cine/Warner Bros. Entertainment España/Ikiru Films/La Niña de la Comunión, AIE/La Terraza Films/Rebellión Terrestre/Atresmedia/M+/Televisio de Catalunya/Cosmo/Orange.
Cast
Carla Campra (Sara), Aina Quiones (Rebe), Marc Soler (Pedro), Carlos Oviedo “Titus” (Chivo), Olimpia Roch (Judit), Xavi Lite (Antonio), Maria Molins (Amparo), Anna Alarcon (Remedios Beltran), Manel Barcelo (Father Manuel), Jacob Torres (Jaime), Merce Llorens (Aunt Teresa), Daniel Rived (Tano), Sara Roch (Marisol Beltran)
Plot
The teenage Sara goes out partying with her best friend Rebe only for their ride home to ditch them. They are forced to accept a ride with the cocky Chivo. They skid when Sara sees a girl in a white communion dress ahead of them. Searching for the girl, Sara finds a doll in a white dress and takes it home. Afterwards, Sara, Rebe and the others find they are covered in a rash. Investigating, they learn about the local legend of Marisol, the girl in a communion dress. According to the legend, at the same time as the doll is found, a hideous ghostly figure will also appear to kill all who touch the doll.
The Communion Girl was the eighth full-length film from Spanish director Victor Garcia. For several years, Garcia has a career in the US that mostly consisted of making sequels to other horror films with the likes of Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007), Mirrors 2 (2010) and the much derided Hellraiser: Revelations (2011), as well as several original films with Artic Predator (2010), Gallows Hill (2013) and An Affair to Die For (2019).
At first glance, The Communion Girl gave all the appearance of being a Spanish version of Annabelle (2014) and sequels. This is not a wrong assumption. It could be Annabelle having been heavily embedded inside Spanish Catholicism to emerge resembling something akin to The Nun (2018) and sequel. Unlike Annabelle, the cursed doll here does not appear to have any life of its own and merely curses whoever touches it whereupon a rash appears on their body and a hideous mummified figure appears to kill them.
The script often appears to consist of jamming a bunch of horror tropes together in the hope that they will work – the cursed doll a la Annabelle; the hideous figure of the undead girl buried at the bottom of a well – shades of Ring (1998); while there are also touches of works like Ju-on: The Grudge (2003) in the idea of the viral curse that spreads out to touch all connected for no reason other than that they were present. It is a conceptual melange that feels awkward and with no real rational schema behind it that makes sense of anything – like explaining what happened to Marisol or where the cursed doll comes from.
Victor Garcia never does much to enliven this. When it gets to scenes of bathroom cabinets or the stall doors in a public bathroom all banging at people, I kept thinking how little The Communion Girl was a film that generated anything genuinely spooky. The pop-up scares with the mummified figure appearing raise a thunder without any real effect. Even the ending the film reaches feels like an abrupt “huh?” – [PLOT SPOILERS] where the girls get away only for the ghostly corpse to then appear in their room. This is followed by a flashback to Marisol finding her doll, which explains nothing about what happened.
Trailer here