It’s been more than a decade since The Walking Dead premiered in households across America, and in that time, a wave of zombie cinema has risen and fallen as filmmakers move on to more in-demand trends. But it is here – in post-peak zombie cinema – that we may yet discover a few strange passion projects that show the true depth of the subgenre. So it is with Isaac Ezban’s Párvulos, a coming-of-age zombie story that defies easy description but finds real heart amidst the darkness of the dead.
When most of the world’s population dies as a result of an untested vaccine, those who survived flee humanity to hide in the woods and live off the land. Salvador (Farid Escalante Correa) has it better than most: his parents were an engineer and a nurse, and before they went missing, they helped their oldest son build a self-sufficient home. But being the head of the household is now a responsibility Salvador shares with middle brother Oliver (Leonardo Cervantes), who works with Salvador to look after the youngest, Benjamin (Mateo Ortega Casillas). Salvador guards his brother's childhood fiercely, attempting to give him a few more years before he must embrace the state of the world.
But Benjamin has questions, many of which revolve around the monster that Salvador and Oliver keep trapped in the basement. Every day, the two brothers dress themselves in football gear and head downstairs to feed the creature, whose screams of hunger shake the very house to its core. Could the creature in the basement have some connection to the disappearance of Benjamin’s mom and dad? As the three brothers take on the prospect of life after the apocalypse, they’ll soon learn why the only constants are family and change.
Párvulos shares the same boundary-breaking energy found in the films of Álex de la Iglesia. Like that filmmaker, Ezban seems to have little patience for keeping his ideas confined to a single genre or mode of storytelling. Párvulos movies freely between tones and styles, transitioning from horror to coming-of-age comedy to disaster movie and then back again. This is a film where characters are torn apart in vivid detail, but also one where the boys’ zombified parents are tied up and left at the kitchen table for an impromptu Christmas celebration. Whenever you think the film has settled, it runs off in a new direction, somehow expanding – not limiting – the space these characters occupy.
In Párvulos, the joy is in the details. Ezban populates his film with little bursts of (metaphorical) color throughout, crafting little traditions for Salvador and his brothers that add richness to the world. Consider that the brothers have access to only one DVD: a battered copy of Robin Wright’s The Congress, which Salvador tolerates and Benjamin adores. Or there’s the fact that Salvador displays the bodies of the home’s previous residents in a grotesque warning against would-be intruders. These are adult ideas filtered through a child’s mindset, and much of Párvulos is an awkward-but-effective marriage between horror and whimsy.
What keeps the entire thing from flying apart at the seams are the performances of its three leads. Párvulos may be a pretty faithful take on the zombie movie, but Ezban and co-writer Ricardo Aguado-Fentanes take great care in showing how the differences in age between the three brothers have shaped their experiences of the world (or lack thereof) around them. Salvador, the oldest, has been ground down by the pressures he carries of protecting his little brothers. Benjamin, on the other hand, has little memory of the world before now and is willing to meet the monster where it lives. If they can teach their downstairs guest(s) a few tricks – how to sleep in a bed or speak a few words from a childhood reader – then perhaps this new normal won’t be so bad after all.
Of course, when you’re throwing everything at the screen, not every choice will land. For those who diligently check their movies against the website www.doesthedogdie.com, I regret to inform you that Párvulos opens with an explicit and sustained dog death, one that immediately suggests a streak of cruelty in Ezban’s movie that only intermittently resurfaces. As audiences, we are also asked to get used to the film’s low-fi aesthetic – a color-washed palette and the occasional switch to a wide-angle lens that calls attention to the artifice and undermines the human beats.
But even Párvulos steps firmly into the realm of exploitation or bad taste, it never loses its connection to the three brothers and their story of survival. Therein lies the secret to making a good horror movie: create characters audiences will connect to and give their lives genuine weight, and you can chase your story off into whatever dark corners of the forest you desire. Párvulos is not a cruel movie. It’s just one willing to take seriously the notion of growing up in an unsafe world. It turns out your coming-of-age story can be a little messed up as long as it stays true to the spirit of childhood. [3.5/5]
