An overwhelming sense of familiarity clings to Mikhail Red’s Lilim, which liberally deploys Gothic and folk horror tropes without grasping their inherent power. The film begins jarringly, with a scream: Issa (Heaven Peralejo) has murdered her abusive father in self-defense, and she quickly flees the scene with her young brother, Tomas (Skywalker David). The siblings soon take refuge in the remote Helping Hands Orphanage, populated by adult nuns and orphaned boys.
Lilim suggests intriguing allegiances to fairytale logic. From the outset, it emphasizes the menace of its central orphanage, which is nestled in the forest and decorated with paintings that invoke the darkest visions of Goya and Caravaggio. Shortly after the siblings arrive, the Helping Hands nuns conspicuously dismiss a weeping man who bolts down the hall. A demonic face appears in the ceiling of the boys’ sleeping chamber, visible to the audience but unseen by the players onscreen. Issa and Tomas learn of Mother Mirasol, the orphanage’s oldest member, now confined to a locked room. The boys refer to Mirasol as a beast who roams the site looking for children to eat, and the nuns treat her like a deity; a nun who accidentally breaks a Mirasol statue is forced to walk barefoot across the shards while reciting reverent phrases.
As the orphanage’s inner dramas unfold, Lilim neglects to seriously address the murder that instigated the siblings’ arrival. The film also loses its focus on the ensuing police investigation, which is hastily reintroduced as a plot contrivance in the final act. Although the narrative maintains a constant threat of danger, and frequently teases the emergence of the monstrous Mirabol, it is otherwise peculiarly devoid of tension and momentum. Lilim builds itself on one of horror’s age-old tropes — the interplay between the sacred and the profane — a theme perennially ripe with visual and metaphoric potential. Unfortunately, however, Lilim is too timid and routine in its depictions of the profane, and it seems entirely uninterested in the metaphysical heft of the sacred.
Red’s film is sturdily made in technical terms, but it ultimately doesn’t rise much above a mechanical exercise. It’s so generically lockstep that its characters become abstractions, even despite Peralejo’s best efforts (she is an innately impressive screen presence). The forceful music cues, meanwhile, function in sum to emphasize the lack of imagistic impact rather than contribute much to compensate for it, and a series of theme-telegraphing monologues drift in and out of scenes without lasting effect. One of the nuns tells Issa that absurdity is part of faith, and one can’t help wishing that this film indulged in a little bit more of both.
Published as part of NYAFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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