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A fever dream of blood, sex, and pastel nightmares, Eduardo Casanova’s SILENCIO isa hallucinatory vision where starving immortals wander through centuries, feeding on scraps of human blood while bickering, fucking, and mourning in equal measure.
The film opens with a woman placing a nude Polaroid into a museum exhibit, before taking us back to the 14th-century to introduce us to a family of vampire sisters. The Black Death has thinned out humanity, and the sisters are starving. Their only hope is to feed on one untainted human man – and also copulate with him in order to produce more heirs.
Complicated family dynamics cause bickering between the sisters, a theme passed down through the generations, as we return to the present day to see how one of the sisters – now feeble and elderly – and her daughter are surviving in the 1980s. The mother wishes for her daughter to have a child to carry on the family line; the daughter is afraid to reveal her queerness, as she knows that will mean she can’t produce an heir.
Visually, SILENCIO is a marvel: the 14th century is bathed in pastels; the later years shown as both neon and gritty – the vampires emanating a strange, grotesque beauty. Casanova has each scene teetering between comedy and tragedy. There’s a feeding sequence where the sisters burst into song mid-slaughter, a scene both absurd and transcendent. And this amazing line, which I had to write down to save: “If you want to have his baby, fine—but what makes no sense is not killing a man afterwards.”
Beneath the humor and the eye-popping visuals, SILENCIO is a film about love, loss, and grief, using the vampires as a metaphor for how the HIV/AIDS crisis forced people to live in the shadows. Broken into three parts that span many decades, each section stretches the common thread of what it means to outlive the world, to starve on scraps of memory and meaning, and finding a love that could outlast everything.
SILENCIO is currently playing at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX.
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