Embrace Me – Y abrazame (2017)

Directed by: Javier Rao | 63 minutes | horror | Actors: Joaquín Sanchez, Querelle Delage, Rocio Muñoz

Joaco (Joaquín Sánchez) is hopelessly in love with Jose (Rocío Muñoz). He revels in her photos on Facebook, writes songs that sing about his heartache and doesn’t care about other girls. When they are left behind after a movie night, he can’t believe his luck. Maybe the love is even mutual. So far nothing strange under the sun. Joaco and his friends continue to live an everyday existence, as only young people can. They hang out on the street, smoke weed and drink alcohol and have casual conversations about girls, music and movies.

Everything changes when Joaco and Jose make love to each other after that movie night. Alienating music swells in the background. The feeling arises that there is a proverbial monster lurking in the shadows somewhere. Then, just before the two climax, the girl flees into the bathroom out of nowhere. Her howling takes over the tape. After some time, the boy decides to take a pulse. He finds an empty bathroom. There is a pool of blood in the bathtub. The window is open. No trace of the girl.

In the future, there is no longer any question of everyday life. When Joaco calls in a friend moments later, the pool of blood has disappeared. Ghosts, other blood apparitions and signs of witchcraft take over the floor. There is a lot going on, and because ‘Embrace Me’ takes great pleasure in exploiting the confusion optimally, it is not easy to put your finger on what exactly is going on. The tension that arises from this effectively gets under the skin. Especially if the strange incidents keep piling up.

Because the film does not look for grotesque scares, the horror remains subtle. That ‘Embrace Me’, for a film of more than an hour, perhaps makes a lot of use of a variety of well-known horror elements does not matter. The film can perhaps best be seen as a decisive ode to the genre. The fact that main character Joaco walks around for a large part of the film in a t-shirt of horror classic ‘Scream’ fits in seamlessly with this.