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EMBRYO (EMBRION, 2020)

Directed by Patricio Valladares.
Written by Barry Keating, Patricio Valladares.
Starring Romina Perazzo, Domingo Guzmán, Carolina Escobar, Cristian Cuentrejo, Evelyn Belmar, Yuri Caceres, Paulina Facuse, Gloria Furmanjuk, Priscilla Luciano, Ignacio Muñoz, Giordano Rossi, François Soto
Find out more about this film here!

A specific mountain region in South America is known for all kinds of paranormal and UFO activity. EMBRYO attempts to interweave three stories together involving this supernatural phenomena.

It looks as if EMBRYO was supposed to be a TV series rather than a movie, so if you remember the TWIN PEAKS TV movie which truncates the entire first season into one 90 minute flick, you’ll understand the disjoined and oddly paced way EMBRYO plays. The narrative flips and flops between three stories—all of them pretty similar, each involving a couple who venture into the cursed region only to find the female abducted, impregnated, murdered, driven insane, or all four. The main thread follows a very SPECIES-like narrative as the female becomes pregnant after disappearing in the night and then develops an insatiable hunger for human flesh. The problem is that all of these short tales really don’t give anyone a chance to develop as a character. Almost immediately after the opening credits, our main couple encounter the UFO. There really isn’t any chance to invest in these characters and even less time to get involved in the tension. Instead the film is edited as if it has to touch base with the other stories without any care to how it affects the flow of the story of the audience’s investment.

Director Patricia Valladares was the madman behind the truly harrowing feral child flick HIDDEN IN THE WOODS from 2012 (it was later remade in the US under the same name). So the director has a ton of talent. The problem is that, I think the director believed he was making a TV series and this material just didn’t translate to feature length. It’s a shame. I’m curious what this director would have done with the material.

Somewhere, there might be an edit of EMBRYO that works, not that I’m going to race to Twitter to demand it (#ReleasetheEmbryoCut). There’s some decent gore that looks like goppy spaghetti and the gals are nice and fit. So that’s cool. Unfortunately, EMBRYO just doesn’t work in the format it’s in right now due to some extremely harsh edits and the wrong format.

Check out the trailer here!!