Mateo is a resentful and mysterious guy who never shows his real feelings. After a fifteen-year-absence Mateo returns to his childhood home to say farewell to his recently deceased mother. There, he will have to get along with an alcoholic father whom he cannot stand and with a bird-shaped creature that torments him every night.

With a use of stunning black and white cinematography to give more mystique and to shape properly the metaphor, Alejandro Guzmán Alvarez (an old friend of PÖFF) brings us an enigmatic story the aura of which lays on horror movies’ rule: monsters are made of our own fears. Braiding fantasy with reality, he creates a tale based on Mexican obsessions (such as the family, the relation with the mother, alcoholism, or traumas not sorted out), which becomes pretty universal, with many grey areas and no clear resolution for the audience to find their own. But beyond all this, who is Estanislao?

Javier Garcia Puerto