American horror films in many respects are simply boring. Deserted cabin in the woods and take it from there. Canadian horror films are marginally superior.
The real horror resides of late in Mexican and Argentinian films.
“The Dollmaker” is no exception.
It combines sophisticated and clever horror with a political allegorical twist.
Expect Pee Wee Herman, Norman Bates, Chucky and David Lynch.
The setting is Palacios a small town with an entry billboard proclaiming nothing bad ever happens there. Quite the opposite. There are numerous missing women. There is more than meets the eye in this quirky rural façade.
Tomás (Rodrigo Noya) in character is quite a Pee Wee Herman and Norman Bates. He works in a video store “Boy Scouts” where the staff wears American Boy Scouts outfits complete with an American flag. The local constabulary wear yellow-coloured police shirts with “Santa Fe Police Department” also sporting an American flag. What is this “American angle”? Political perhaps?
Tomás has gruesome hallucinations of his dead father and mother and frequently mistakes humans for dolls. He crafts bizarre dolls for a hobby. He lives and cares for his invalid “mother”, so it seems.
A new police inspector arrives in Palacios with serious intent to locate the missing women. There are occasional shots of these women in a basement undergoing torture, mutilation and rape.
It is not terribly difficult to determine the abductor and torturer.
The film resolves itself with an exposed cover up, double murder suicide and evidence of an early age psychotic shielded for years by the cover up. As they say,“bad to the bone”.
With some imagination is the plot also an allegorical reference to the 30,000 or so missing and murdered during the brutal Argentinian military dictatorship of 1976-1983? The American flagged Boy Scouts outfit, as the Boy Scout organization was exposed as corrupt and youth predatory, and the American flag on the outfits of the Palacios constabulary are indicative of military force of the dictatorship and the tacit acceptance of such by the Ford administration of the United States? Pay close attention to the headlines cut and pasted with the opening credits featuring stories of missing people, human rights, bombing by terrorists and Hitler accusations levelled against President Roosevelt. A hint of an upcoming politically tinged film?
Of what importance is the Presidential announcement at the film’s conclusion? A deluded political swindle perhaps as the Argentinian junta purloined on Argentinians equally delusional as the abductor and killer?
Horror and political allegory? Have I gone too far or have you missed a subtlety? Is the subtlety horror and political history the main disguised theme of “The Dollmaker”
Another Argentinian beauty directed by José Maria Cicala with stellar music by Nahuel Maeso.
Arrives on VOD/digital 25August2026.
You may watch trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgydDAf50sc
RKS Argentinian Film Rating 90/100.
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