黎明前的黑暗

a beach, a cliff, a pine tree forest, and a house made of stone. In the house, Virginia wakes up startled by a nightmare, and in the nightmare we can see her cousin Anabel with a deathly pale face and traces of blood around her lips. There's always an instant moment of normality immediately prior to insanity, but in his film Martín Desalvo refuses us the access to it: there's not a single shot that doesn't transmit the feeling of imminent horror, whether it's in the recurrent and premonitory dreams Virginia suffers, or the development of a main plot that revolves around a rabies outbreak that seems to have spread in the area. And that horror slowly gains shape and moves into Virginia's house and its surroundings, where decaying animal corpses start to appear. Stylish and disturbing, Darkness by Day puts into images the dream of any exquisite genre cinema lover, through a story that draws directly from HP Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood and yet uses the same devotion to echo The Beyond's Lucio Fulci and Mirror's Andrej Tarkovsky