5 years after the burnt body of her daughter Angela was found
horribly tortured & mutilated, Claudia (Emma Vilarasau) receives phonecalls from someone claiming to be Angela, & as she
investigates, she finds some proof that that might just be true. So she
hooks up with the cop Bruno (Karra Elejalde), who
worked on the case back then but has since left the force, & they
dig up more & more proof that Angela in fact might still be alive,
& a group of Satanists - The Nameless - might be behind it all, who
are lead by a certain Santini (Carlos Lasarte), who took an unhealthy
interest into torture when he was in Dachau, but now spends his time in
jail for torturing children just like Angela. A videotape sent to
Quiroga (Tristán Ulloa), reporter for a parapsychological magazine,
which does include violent depictions of torture but also glimpses of
Claudia looking for her daughter further confounds their suspicions of
the Nameless' involvement. & thanks to some clues that Santini
deliberately gives Claudia when she visits him in jail, she, Bruno &
Quiroga soon figure out the center of it all, the place where to find
Angela ... which is the - since abandoned - hotel where Angela was
originally conceived. At the hotel, both Bruno & Quiroga meet an
untimely & violent end, while Claudia finds out the man behind it
all - her own ex-husband & father of her daughter (Brendan Price),
but she also finds Angela (Jessica Del Pozzo), who acts like a perverted
virgin, but when she has to choose whom to shoot, (bad) father or (good)
mother, she chooses to fkill her father, with her mother embracing her,
telling her how much she loves her ... until Angela - having learned how
her mother would suffer from her death - puts her gun into her own
mouth, pulls the trigger & ... Though the movie boasts an
interesting, even intelligent storyline & the direction manages to
create an uneasy atmosphere, the movie itself is nowhere as interesting
as it should/could have been, since it is focussed way too much on the
investigation of its central characters as such without building up
suspense or make the story otherwise exciting. What is left is the
central characters endlessly mentioning names (that in a film called nameless)
who might have something to do with it, than visiting the mentioned
person(s), who most probably just mentions another name ... in the end
one just has to give up figuring out who is who. At least half of the
characters might have made sense in the novel but do make absolutely no
sense here & should have been omitted from the screenplay, instead
giving the central characters - who stay surprisingly flat - more
time/room to develop. Pity, could have been good. |