ROSARIO - Mark Reviews Movies

Rosario, Mucho Mas Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 1, 2025

Rosario eventually gets at some intriguing ideas about guilt, regret, and the cost of fulfilling a dream. All of that, however, is wrapped up in a horror movie that sacrifices coherence for a string of cheap scares and too many twists for the story to really deal with its assorted themes in a genuine way.

Because Alan Trezza's screenplay is sincere about its ideas beneath those horror trappings, it does mean the movie is more disappointing than frustrating. To be sure, it's frustrating, too, especially since the premise of it shows some promise even as a horror tale.

We meet Rosario (Emeraude Toubia), the daughter of immigrants to the United States from Mexico, who has apparently exceeded her family's expectations for her. She's currently a successful stockbroker living and working in Manhattan. When her father Oscar (José Zúñiga) calls with the news that her maternal grandmother has died, Rosario drops everything to go to the grandmother's Brooklyn apartment, where her body is waiting to be recovered by an ambulance.

There are a few things to note about this seemingly sad but mundane situation. First, a blizzard is approaching the city, and while that means Rosario might have to wait longer for paramedics than she initially anticipated, it also means that she's basically stuck in this apartment building. Marty (Paul Ben-Victor), the building superintendent, warns her about the intense weather before she tries to leave at one point, and that seems to be all that he's good for at his job.

The apartment complex is a squalid place, which—given how often the lights are out—doesn't seem capable of providing electricity to its tenants. At least that makes for an appropriate setting for a movie in which creepy figures move around in the background before director Felipe Vargas has them pop into frame or cuts right to them for several scares. It's not entirely about that, of course, because there are also disembodied hands popping out of various places, but the process becomes repetitive.

The other major piece of background to note is that Rosario's grandmother Griselda (Constanza Gutierrez) was a practitioner of a religion called Palo. That's introduced in a prologue featuring a young Rosario, celebrating her First Communion with her family in this very apartment, finds her grandma hiding in her bedroom, popping out to startle her granddaughter, and bleeding profusely from her arm.

For some helpful context, the present-day Rosario spends a good amount of time doing online searches about that faith system, helpfully reading the text aloud so that audience can understand the plot-necessary basics of curses, wishes, animal offerings, and blood sacrifices. It's clumsy exposition for some equally ungainly plot and scare setups (not to mention how a nosy neighbor, played by David Dastmalchian, and his search for his air fryer comes into play by the end).

All of this is to say that the movie isn't an especially effective horror tale, as Rosario waits around the apartment, starts to notice strange things happening, and searches for why that might be the case. She eventually finds a hidden door in the grandmother's bedroom closet, which hides a secret lair filled with skulls (both animal and human), pointy plant growths, and a cauldron where grandma apparently performed some rituals. When she isn't being terrified by ghastly but familiar-looking figures and those gnarled hands popping out of places (and one orifice), Rosario does spend a lot of time reading those internet searches and her grandmother's spell book, which points to the possibility that Griselda may have cursed her granddaughter.

That development makes it tough to dismiss the movie as simply an unsuccessful exercise in horror, because the underlying story is so intriguing. It's one of a close family torn apart by circumstances, tragedy, and the desire for the older generations to see the younger ones succeed beyond them. We learn that Rosario and her grandmother were estranged, following her parents' divorce, her time in college and getting a job, and after her mother's death. The guilt here isn't just in how Rosario stopped seeing or even speaking to Griselda or how she didn't come home from school while her mother was dying. It's not even in choosing to live with her father after the divorce. It's in putting her drive for success over a part of her family—a drive that, ironically, that same family instilled in her from a young age.

There's a level of emotional complexity in this back story that can't be ignored, even if the filmmakers don't dig into it too much and always filter it through the routine elements of their horror tale. By the time everything about the family's past and the nature of whatever spellcasting was happening in the apartment comes to light, Rosario hints at the complications and contradictions of the immigrant experience, especially in terms of what sacrifices are worth the promise of seeing one's children succeed. That's the more compelling story here, but the reliance on horror trappings doesn't do it justice.

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