Despite the name, truly scary horror movies are rare. They can famously be found at any budget level, but actually frightening an audience takes skill, and I’m typically walking into a horror film more hoping to be scared than expecting it.

What I expect instead is imagination. Horror is a genre of repeтιтion and experimentation, of returning to the same setups and finding creative ways to coax something unfamiliar out of them. Best case, you get something that feels totally fresh and original, but these, too, don’t come around often. One new idea, cool wrinkle, or inventive kill can be all a movie needs to find appreciators willing to recommend it forward.

Rosario

, from first-time director Felipe Vargas, is not scary, nor particularly good. For most of its runtime, it’s not especially inventive, either. But when the film decides it’s time to stop playing coy, one cool idea surfaces. It’s underexplored, and, in my view, not handled well enough to overshadow the movie’s shortcomings. But it is there.

Rosario Doesn’t Do Enough With Its Solid Horror Premise

For Most Of Its Runtime, At Least

We first meet the тιтular heroine in 1999, when she’s celebrating her first communion with her immigrant family in a Brooklyn apartment. Her mother Elena (Diana Lein) is stern and ill; her father Oscar (José Zúñiga) speaks warmly of Rosario’s future as their collective dream. Her grandmother Griselda (Constanza Gutierrez), who is presented as off-puttingly shifty and who conceals maggots in her room, clearly isn’t as Catholic as the rest of them. She’s a pracтιтioner of Palo, the true nature of which neither we nor Rosario learn until much later.

We jump ahead to the present, when Rosario (Emeraude Toubia) has found success in finance, living the dream her father had for her. All day, she has ignored many phone calls from her grandmother, but when she finally picks up, she gets the building superintendent (Paul Ben-Victor) instead. Griselda has died. Seeing as she’s undocumented, with no will, it’s best if a relative can be there when her body is collected.

Then the strangeness begins. Her grandmother’s voice, apologizing, coming through her phone. Flashes of her sick mother, long since ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. The eerie apartment building and the suspicious cuts and markings on Griselda’s corpse. When Rosario does some snooping and finds something her grandmother had hidden, she becomes aware that something supernatural is after her. Trapped there by a vicious snowstorm, she must get to the bottom of what’s happening before she winds up ᴅᴇᴀᴅ.

It’s not a bad premise in itself, but in execution, it’s as rote as they come. Rosario‘s script is weakest at the level of plotting. The ways it strings one event into the next range from uninspired to, in a couple instances, laughable. Vargas tries to build atmosphere by casting suspicion in every direction, but none of the alternative options are ever convincing enough to have the desired effect. Griselda’s super and neighbor (David Dastmalchian) are both odd, but not credibly threatening, and one conclusion Rosario comes to is so obviously wrong that watching her play it out was frustrating.

Rosario’s One Interesting Concept Isn’t Going To Cut It

Not If Vargas Wants To Walk The Path Of Sam Raimi

The films of Sam Raimi seem like clear touchstones for Rosario, his Evil ᴅᴇᴀᴅ series and Drag Me to Hell in particular. The effectiveness of evocative design work, especially when it comes to gross detailing, is one takeaway put to good use. The movie has the most fun when it lingers on the apartment, Griselda’s body, or the recurring visions of Rosario’s mother, which get increasingly twisted as the night goes on. One effect involving the corpse’s mouth is revisited a few times, and I can’t fault the filmmakers for the repeтιтion – it works every time.

But aping Raimi takes more than disgusting prosthetics and a few camera tilts. His horror movies are defined by their inventiveness, to the extent that the drive to constantly do something new and interesting becomes its own propulsive force. Rosario has far too much faith in the clichés it should be trying to innovate, and the direction isn’t strong enough to make the most of the well-trodden path it goes down.

Only in the final act does it show any real signs of life, when Rosario’s first-generation backstory, which for most of the movie is little more than justification for Griselda’s religion, is put to good use. To be suddenly watching a much better movie is a welcome experience, but not without its drawbacks. For one, I had to wonder why Rosario couldn’t have been like this the whole time.

Ultimately, this episode feels like an aside; too disconnected from the rest of the drama to pull the film back together. A few more script pᴀsses to properly seed this idea, to make it mean something, and this might’ve been a very different review. As it stands, Rosario stretches the material of a really good short film into an underwhelming feature.