A brother and sister return from Spain to their ancestral homeland, Argentina, to wrap-up the affairs of their estranged father, who is in a coma and on life support. On a lark, they head south in dad’s car from Buenos Aires to the home they barely remember at the tip of South America in Tierra del Fuego. Out on DVD, TheAppeared, by Argentine writer-director Paco Cabezas, becomes more than a road trip as the sunny uplands give way to a journey into a suppressed past and a recurring nightmare of horror.
The set-up is excellent: the supernatural is rooted in a story of Argentina’s brutal dictatorship of the 1970s and early ‘80s, with ghosts as a metaphor of an unquiet history. The cast, with Javier Pereira and Ruth Diaz as brother and sister, does its job well. The problem lies in a screenplay that sags in the middle through improbable scenes whose plotting is more reminiscent of bad Hollywood than Guillermo del Toro. The climax, however, is a killer, suggesting that Cabezas could develop into a fine genre writer if he ignores the many poor examples out there for making a scary movie.
