In a recent interview with critic Carlos Aguilar, filmmaker Isaac Ezban recounts seeing Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth while in film school and being bowled over by its mixture of brutal violence and more fantastical, fairy tale elements. Indeed, del Toro’s influence is all over Ezban’s newest film, Párvulos: Children of the Apocalypse, in ways both good and bad. While zombie movies seem a bit passé at the moment, centering the narrative around a trio of young boys ill-prepared for such hardship separates Ezban’s film from the hordes of cheap zombie product currently proliferating on various streamers. But eventually the tropes pile up, and viewers are left only with some pretty familiar obstacles and leaden morals about how maybe mankind is the real monster. It’s also a deeply ugly film to look at (more on that later).
Párvulos begins with three brothers scavenging for food in the deep woods of Jalisco, Mexico. Teenaged Salvador (Farid Escalante Correa) is the oldest and strongest of the trio and therefore the leader, while middle child Oliver (Leonardo Cervantes) narrates the film, giving a brief introduction to this world overrun by flesh-chomping undead (weirdly, the film purports that the outbreak was caused by rushed vaccines for a Covid-like virus). Oliver is also big enough to assist Salvador with manual labor, as the older brother is missing one leg below the knee and uses crutches for their various outdoor excursions. The two boys are determined to protect their youngest brother, the adorable moppet Benjamin (Mateo Ortega Casillas), who just wants their missing parents to return home. Párvulos charts the boys’ day-to-day life, with periodic interruptions from something noisy down in the basement. Thankfully, Ezban doesn’t play coy for too long with this “secret”; the parents aren’t missing, they’re zombies, and have been locked up downstairs where Salvador periodically feeds them wild game. Norma Flores and Horacio F. Lazo play the parents — under many layers of elaborate makeup — and they are suitably grimy, although they don’t seem to pose much of a threat (at least at first). It’s a tedious existence, for the most part, and the boys idle away the days looking at old family photos, playing games, and generally keeping away from the rest of the world. There is word that a cure exists in some of the larger cities, but little hope exists that it might make its way further out into the surrounding areas.
After a solid first act, Párvulos begins to veer off course in a series of questionable narrative detours. The secret of the missing parents now revealed, the boys begin to try taming them. A series of slapstick montages shows the zombies being at least partially amenable to training, and the odd interlude ends with a ghoulish family portrait that the boys proudly place on the wall. Next, a young woman named Valeria (Clara Adell) stumbles across the boy’s home. She’s quick to ingratiate herself with the group, and is perfectly willing to offer Salvador his first sexual encounter in exchange for safe haven, but this scenario meets an abrupt, ignominious end, and soon the boys are set upon by a group of religious zealots (led by Noé Hernández) who convert or murder anyone they come across in a ritualistic fashion. It’s all very abrupt, flitting from one plot to another, cramming all these threads together when each one could have reasonably sustained a more thoughtful feature film on its own (Valeria’s fate is particularly insensitive, reducing Adell’s vivacious performance down to a damsel in distress and then a punchline). The tone is also all over the place, a welcome feat when creators are able to pull it off, but merely jarring when it’s as unsuccessful as it is here.
And on top of everything else, Párvulos is presented in a decidedly hideously, desaturated fashion. In the same aforementioned interview, Ezban states that the decision to drain the color out of the film came during post-production, and it’s frankly an awful choice. The occasional photo or drawing is still rendered in color, obviously designed to give these objects greater significance within the larger image, but the majority of the film is left as flat, ugly digital mush, with little depth to the frame and virtually no gradation between gray and white. True blacks are non-existent, and white highlights blow out the image constantly. It looks like a bad filter, and it severely dampens the otherwise fine work that the actors do. Chalk Párvulos up to one of those movies with its heart in the right place, but utterly sunk by too many bad choices.
DIRECTOR: Isaac Ezban; CAST: ddd; DISTRIBUTOR: Firebook Entertainment; IN THEATERS: April 4; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
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