Review of Sanctorum

Figuratively beautiful, this film seems to hint at a kind of doomsday for a humanity that is all about violence, hatred and oppression. In a beautiful mountain landscape perpetually bathed in fog, the inhabitants of a village work for drug traffickers cultivating their plantations. They are forced to work for little and are ordered around by terror. Some of them are killed and the government military blames the villagers for the massacre. In this situation of hopeless grief, the young son of one of the murdered women sets off at night into the forest in search of his mother. Two small black dogs accompany him. Disturbing noises are heard coming from a cave or from the mountain, like the dark sound of a bell. And while the child, who is crying with fear, is enveloped by small lights, like guiding spirits, some very strange beings are gathered in the cave for a conversation: they are fiery human outlines that, like angels of death, come out into the woods and move towards the armed soldiers. In the meantime, a storm breaks out in the sky, fierce lightning strikes the vault of heaven and crazed clouds overlap and chase each other.

A powerful and evocative film that seems to suggest that God, Nature or, in any case, a Higher Power, fed up with the abuses of this humanity, intends to destroy it. Congratulations to the makers for a film that remains impressed in the mind and soul.