The Funeral Home (2020) Review

The Funeral Home (2020) Review

Bernardo (Luis Machín) is an undertaker. He and his dysfunctional family lives amongst coffins, wreaths and mischievous supernatural entities that visit daily. They attribute the paranormal manifestations to the dead bodies from their mortuary work. Finding the real source of all this madness will be their quest, but they might find a terrifying truth.

Refreshingly this supernatural shocker jumps straight into the action, there’s none of that ‘ghosts slowly creeping into the picture during the first act’ nonsense going on here, the spectres are already there! From the start of THE FUNERAL HOME (original title ‘La Funeraria’) our main characters are seen attempting to cope with living with bothersome malevolent spirits and for the next hour and a half there’s absolutely no letting up.

Writer and director Mauro Iván Ojeda pulls off that rare feat of maintaining the unsettling and scary atmosphere throughout before increasing the pitch for the ‘peeking through your fingers’ final act, not bad for a first feature. Most impressive is the segment where local exorcist Ramona (Susana Varela) visits the estranged family and discovers that her initial assumption that the ghosts inhabiting the funeral home were not a danger to the family is very, very wrong indeed.

THE FUNERAL HOME plays like the antithesis of POLTERGEIST – there’s no fluffy sentiment or colourful effects displays here, it’s dark, twisted and grim – and aside from the odd niggle early on this is as fine and as frightening as supernatural horror gets.

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