‘Gaua’: 17th century witches only wanted to love and live in freedom | Cinema: previews and reviews

Paul Urkijo has created a laudable niche for himself in Spanish cinema with a type of film that no one else makes: period fantasy, Basque mythology, ancestral tales, terror of the forest, the pain of disadvantaged human beings. Films so influenced by the history of their land and mythology euskaldun as well as comics, adventure novels and fantasy films. So they were singular Errementari (The Blacksmith and the Devil) (2017) and the remarkable Angry (2022). With Gaua repeats the formula, but this time with a film with a social thesis, also exposed from the beginning: patriarchal societies, gender violence and sisterhood, traveling from the 17th century.

No one doubts that this was the case. But the subtlety is invisible Oh, with one-shot, good and bad characters from conventional fantasy films. The extent of those women burned at the stake and considered witches at the time of the Inquisition has changed so much in recent times that, more than a vindication, what those women perhaps needed was a profound reflection on the powers that led to their death in the flames. The two villains of Gaua —an abusive husband with all the tics of the 21st century and a contentious priest—yet they are all of a piece. And this never suits cinema. Urkijo is honored to have made a hymn to the female identity of the 17th century, between covens, passions, torture and escapes, but some of her most intimate attitudes seem transplanted from contemporaneity.

What Urkijo champions is his talent for composing impactful visual images about the night, the mystery of forests and superstition. His cinema is unmatched for these payments. In fact, it saves the distance, especially in terms of images, the closest thing to Gaua His previous works would be Akelarre (1987), by Pedro Olea, also set in the 17th century, and The Devil’s Breath (1993), directed by Paco Lucio and co-written by Elías Querejeta and Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón: medieval epic, clashes of civil, religious and social power with a certain sense of fairy tale. The witches of Zugarramurdi (2013), by Álex de la Iglesia, circulated in another vein, that of the extravagant horror comedy.

Paganism and female homosexuality, superstition and religion, oppression and freedom, monasteries and demons, come together in Oh, which finds the best way to escape from the discursive depth of the first half with a second section that is much more spectacular and free in the deployment of special effects. It is then that Urkijo moves and entertains with its rural mythology and its well-documented demons, without many (self-)moral impositions, and also when its narrative game of Russian dolls finally converges in its circular structure of intertwined fairy tales.

Of course, the dignity of the witches of that brutal modern age is necessary, but in this case perhaps even more so is the entertainment, verve and visual charm of a story, set almost entirely at night and shot in Basque, which takes a little time to channel its tone.