‘Parvulos’: Fantasia Review

Dir: Isaac Ezban. Mexico. 2024. 118mins

A thought-provoking, slick and visually striking story about the lives of three young brothers tackling life in a post-apocalyptic, infected world, Mexican Isaac Ezban’s fifth feature Parvulos is a film of two halves. Ezban’s previous, award-winning work such The Incident and Evil Eye has been based on mind-bending games with space and time. This time, the drama is rooted in the primal, emotional bond between parents and kids and, until its mid-point, it’s compelling and engaging – but then lapses into standard gore tropes and little else.

Thought-provoking, slick and visually striking 

Nevertheless, even though Parvulos may not fully achieve its potential, this new departure for its director should still find a home at fantasy festivals and sidebars, appealing to gore fans and genre audiences looking for something deeper.

The Spanish title loosely translates into English as ‘small children’. Opening close-up shots of the natural world clearly set out Parvulos’ questionable world-view, that the only constants in life are family and change. In a remote country house with features including dead bodies hanging from trees in the garden, one-legged teen Savador (Felix Farid Escalante) puts himself through a gruelling physical ritual, involving the drinking of mashed worms and honey: he has taken over the role of raising his young brothers Oliver (Leonardo Cervantes) and the youngest Benjamin (Mateo Ortega Casillas) following a viral pandemic. 

There are noises coming from the basement, and whatever is making them needs to be fed with the meat that the boys hunt with a crossbow. Salvador and Oliver know what’s down there, but neither Benjamin nor the viewer (who might suspect the truth) does. That is, until Benjamin’s curiosity overwhelms him and downstairs he encounters, snarling and lurching toward him from out of the darkness, the boys’ wild-haired, zombified parents, infected all the way up to their popping eyeballs.

Ezban has stated that Parvulos is about families, and the beautifully mounted scenes following the revelation are at once grimly comic and tender, driven by Benjamin’s innocent understanding that these foul creatures are actually still his parents (Norma Flores and Horacio Lazo, delivering remarkable physical performances), and can be saved by ’training’ them back to normality. (Touchingly, it is the parents themselves who have prepared the kids for this awful new life.) Benjamin reads ‘Hansel and Gretel’ to them; they take the parents out for a walk, they celebrate Christmas together – and the film acquires a solid emotional substructure, meaning that lapses into risibility are just about sidestepped. Flashbacks of the leadup to all of this, such as how Salvador lost his leg, add depth and complexity. 

But then, as though someone has suddenly remembered that this is supposed to be a zombie movie, all this solid work is jettisoned for the film’s home stretch, which is mostly just nasty. It includes some love interest for Salvador in the form of Valeria (Carla Adell), but extended sequences are given over to standard gurning histrionics from an apocalyptic, self-proclaimed preacher man Enoc (Noe Hernandez), who turns up with his followers wanting to kill our little heroes. Those stated themes of family and change have gone off-radar, but return to authentically disturbing effect over the final scenes.

Serious character work has gone into the making of Salvador, who has had to transform himself into a hardened, emotionally immune adult, and Benjamin, whose defiantly wide-eyed view defines the tone of the strongest scenes: Casillas renders his suffering with heartbreakingly authentic plausibility. The amount of dramatic psychological pain that the script foists on the sweet trio of kids is at times tough to watch. Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of physical pain for gore fans, as entrails and still-beating hearts are torn from living bodies with toe-curling, tech-assisted plausibility.

Parvulos is a visually stylish film, shot largely in monochrome tones but with moments of colour reserved for special moments. Art direction by Ezban regular Adelle Achar focuses mainly on the weird and cluttered interiors of the house, which looks like a photogenically arranged junk shop. Cinematographer Rodrigo Sandoval Vega Gil has a great eye for the carefully composed gothic tableau: one scene has the three kids looking up at three strung-up cadavers, one of many arresting moments in this strangely divided film.