EVERYONE WILL BURN - Mark Reviews Movies

Everyone Will Burn, Drafthouse Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 30, 2023

A supernatural horror soap opera that isn't nearly as fun as that description might sound, Everyone Will Burn doesn't have much to say, except that small towns can be the worst. Here, a woman, still grieving the early death of her son ten years prior, finds herself finished with the politics, the gossip, the backstabbing, the sordid history, and the general awfulness of the town where she lives. About to jump from a bridge, María José (Macarena Gómez) is stopped by the sudden appearance of a young girl behind her.

It's a fairly simple setup, but after those relatively quiet and haunting opening moments, co-writer/director David Hebreros' movie immediately escalates its tone to a frantic pitch and its narrative to excess. Actually, the latter occurs even before we meet María José, since there's a dreadful secret that's not so much one that has come to define this town for some 40 years.

Fearing an apocalyptic event as foreseen and foretold by some religious people in the area, the townsfolk came together to arrive at a terrifying decision: to sacrifice a baby to forestall the end of the world. It worked, apparently, or more likely, it was just a lot of fearmongering leading to a horrific mob mentality. In the present-day town, the murderous event has become fodder for a lullaby that has been sung by parents to their children for decades, but only those who lived through those terrible times know the full truth of its origin.

At this point, the movie already has gone over whatever edge exists for this story, and the plot itself hasn't even begun. The ritual murder of a baby, even unseen within the movie, in order to stop the end of the world is about as extreme as a result can get to stakes that either are as high as can be or point to how far-gone the mentality of this town's inhabitants can become. It's not that such a story doesn't have anywhere to go. It's just that Hebreros and co-screenwriter Javier Kirán certainly don't seem to have an idea where to take it, except toward plenty of melodrama and to a lot of predictable ends.

Going back to our protagonist, María José's suicide attempt is stopped by Lucía (Sofía García), who looks and dresses like a little girl, although she also has dwarfism and, more vital to the point of her character, telekinetic abilities. Lucía calls María José her mother, even though our protagonist has never seen this girl anywhere in her entire life, and the confusion leads to a brief confrontation with a couple of cops who think something is amiss. Lucía controls one of them to stab the other, before using her mind to immolate the surviving officer alive. Technically, the movie has already broken the promise of its title, but even that feels like a shallow provocation, anyway.

Despite the heightened introduction, the rest of the movie is surprisingly grounded in terms of its plot. María José takes Lucía to her home, becomes increasingly irritated by her neighbors (Somehow, that's possible, despite the opening scene, apparently), and seeks revenge on them on her own or with the girl's help. Most of her bad feelings revolve around the death of her son, who was bullied for "being different" (Lucía's condition eventually reveals itself to have a point), a decade ago. The son of the mayor (played by Fernando Cayo) and his wife Tere (Ana Milán) was the boy's primary bully, and when that guilt-stricken young man dies under mysterious but familiar circumstances, his mother correctly deduces that María José and the new stranger in town had something to do with it.

The main thrust of this is that pretty much everyone in town has a secret and is a hypocrite in some way—facts that don't come across as too surprising or shocking, considering that they're descendants of people who ritualistically murdered a baby. Lucía seems to know them all—or, at least, the ones that have the closest relationships to María José. Take the woman's ex-husband David (Rodolfo Sancho), who shows up with his new and pregnant wife Ari (Ella Kweku), to help María José through this crisis. Lucía knows what he did while his wife grieved for their son, and meanwhile, Fr. Abelino (Germán Torres) has his own secrets involving a young man named Juan (Rubén Ochandiano), who also wants to be a priest.

The whole of this goes around in circles—hinting at a lot of terrible possibilities, killing off a troublesome neighbor here and there, repeating the process again and again. To be sure, Hebrero shows a strong sense of style with Everyone Will Burn, with the movie's rich color palette and its occasional flashes of over-the-top horror theatrics (A climactic siege makes use of Lucía's powers in ways that mainly make one wonder where those ideas have been until that point). Beyond that, though, the foundation of this tale is slight, while its conclusions are both on the nose and anticlimactic.

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