Director: Kiko Prada
Writer: Kiko Prada
Cast: Carla Nieto, Mario Mayo, Diego Moreno Peire & Elizabeth Anne Miller
Running time: 10mins
Refugios (in English, Shelters) is a post-apocalyptic horror, following a lone woman as she is hunted through the woods by a pair of disgusting and violent strangers. The plot, such as it is, allows us virtually no insight into the characters – instead focusing on providing an extremely simple, A-B proof of concept.
Marta (Carla Nieto) is pursued by Claudio (Mario Mayo), and taken as a prisoner back to the shack that he shares with Julio (Diego Moreno). The two assailants are virtually interchangeable, with the exception of the latter’s strong hairline – and they have identical goals. After mutilating and assaulting Marta, they intend to make her into tomorrow’s stew.
This plot is foiled when mysterious stranger Natalia (Elizabeth Anne Miller) rescues Marta, knifing Julio in the back just as he gets his plan under way. The two women escape, with Natalia issuing a hurried exposition that she has seen many cannibals in the area, and can offer sanctuary in a nearby shelter: presumably some kind of Fallout style security vault, but preserved for so few members of the population that they are apparently seen as a myth.
The escape turns out merely to be a temporary reprieve – with Claudio sneaking up on the two women, and the action cutting to black just as he is about to inflict a lethal blow on Marta. Telling you as much in my review arguably constitutes a spoiler, and I would be inclined to agree with you if it weren’t for two points.
First, there is nothing to be spoiled: the film commits to the most obvious and direct path forward at all times. Second, that fact and its general technical competence make me relatively confident that this is not supposed to be a stand-alone film, but rather a proof of concept. It soldiers on without a care in the world for intrigue or conflict, obsessed with showing an audience which might include future backers what Kiko Prada and his team can do.
It could be said that this is as valid a reason to make a short film as any. But from what I have seen in the past, treating short form storytelling as a means to an end usually undermines the goal of creating a larger project – because it fails to show a level of respect to the art form that producers look for when picking out new directors and projects.
Being able to show you can clearly demonstrate a character’s arc (especially with a cast which seems to be doing really great work here) is just as important as being able to show the horrible, gory world they live in, if you are going to take an audience on an emotional journey. It is not enough to show that with a micro-budget, you can pick out some nice shots of remote life, or follow a frenetic chase through an empty wood. You need to be able to help audiences build a relationship with your lead character, use that to ratchet up tension, and subvert expectations in key moments – to show you can keep viewers engaged. There were opportunities to do all of the above here, and they were passed up.
But even if we take Refugios as an exercise in world-building, its technical qualities are hit and miss. The cinematography of Daniel G. Canal does a relatively good job of obscuring any clean edges the human environments featured would have had. Too many times, we’ve seen low-budget horror shorts place us in a “post-apocalyptic environment” where someone is mysteriously still trimming the verge. But at the same time, we see precious little of the wider landscape.
Refugios was filmed somewhere rural and mountainous. There would have been a wealth of natural imagery to draw upon to add a kind of gloss to this production that no amount of money could buy. But we are never given time and space to drink in the grandeur of the horizon, or to realise just how futile the human drama playing out is in that context.
At the same time, while Prada does a good job of ensuring his cast are suitably grimy – this is a million miles from the perfectly coiffed ‘rugged’ survivors of Hollywood apocalypse-porn – and keeps the (presumably) sparkling-white teeth of the actors hidden from view for most of the film. But when moments of significant physical trauma occur, Prada’s realism desserts him.
When Marta tries to flee the shack, her tormentors amputate her left hand, for reasons only known to them. This presented the chance of Prada’s team to shock audiences with a limited budget, via some grisly DIY special effects. However, after the staple cop-out of cutting to black, just as the cleaver thuds into her wrist, Marta awakes to find the wound obscured by bandaging. As she runs through the woods in the closing minutes, we see that the bandage is conspicuously (comically) the exact length and shape of the hand that was there before. Having been taken completely out of the moment by this poorly delivered artifice, this is not the kind of detail audiences will overlook.
Personally, I would still like to see more of the world that Kiko Prada and his collaborators are constructing here. Honestly, though, there were opportunities to see more of it in Refugios – and failing to take advantage of them has rendered this a far less satisfying and engaging teaser as a result.