Facies

It’s 1692. The Inquisition is in its declining years. Public sentiment has begun to shift and it is widely perceived as having gone too far, yet its gradual collapse has also led to a loss of control at the top, with individual inquisitors and their attendants increasingly acting on their own initiative. This Spanish short, which screened at Fantasia 2022, focuses on one such man, who, in the absence of a clearer mission, has become obsessed with the idea of seeing what his Pagan enemies look like when in the maximum possible amount of pain.

To this end, he has enlisted a man who used to be known as an inventor, and who, for that very reason, found himself in trouble with the Church. This man has lost his wife as a result, but he still has a daughter, and for fear of what might happen to her, he has agreed to turn his talents to the building of torture devices. It is on the use of one such device that the plot of this film hangs, though it is an adjacent issue which brings it to its conclusion.

Short films almost always struggle with finance, but you wouldn’t know it here. The sets, props and costumes are detailed and effective, the cinematography and sound are both impressive, and the overall impression one gets is that this is a production which has been lavished with care. The sheer amount of physical force required to operate the central torture device seems to have been overlooked, but that’s a forgivable sin in a genre where human bodies frequently come apart as if they were made of tissue paper, and it nevertheless bears some resemblance to real devices used in the period.

The real problem here is that the story is very slight, even for a short, and the twist at the end is far too obvious. As a result, it’s unlikely to linger long in the memory. One hopes that this won’t prevent it from attracting due notice to a capable production team, who might do very good work with more substantial material.