Pedro Martín-Calero, director of El llanto: ‘We wanted to turn around those commonplaces in horror films that make them predictable’.

• Silver Shell for Best Director at the San Sebastian Festival, El llanto is a metaphor for the violence suffered by women.

Valladolid, 20 October 2024. With his first film, El llanto, director Pedro Martín-Calero has managed to reverse the genre codes of horror films to tell a story (or three) about gender violence, winning the award for Best Director at the San Sebastian Festival. Starring Ester Expósito, Mathilde Ollivier and Malena Villa, it is presented in a special screening at this edition of the Valladolid International Film Festival (SEMINCI).

El llanto is a dramatic horror film that assumes the codes of the most psychological side of the genre. The plot focuses on three women who are haunted in different places and at different moments in time by the same overwhelming sound: a cry. ‘We wanted to turn around certain commonplaces in horror films that make them predictable, and one of them is the linear structure,’ the director said.

For this reason, he co-wrote the script with Isabel Peña (As Bestas, El reino), which proposes a circular story in three episodes, with Ester Expósito as the main character. The actress, who accepted because of her admiration for the scriptwriter, was attracted by the possibility of her proposing a metaphor to make the audience reflect on the violence suffered by women, as well as being able to approach the character from the point of view of vulnerability.

She was later joined by Mathilde Ollivier and Malena Villa, who convinced the director so much that he adapted the character to the Argentinean Malena Villa, even though the script did not fit her: ‘I was caught by the fact that she launched such a powerful message, almost political, from the language of terror’, said Malena Villa. For her part, Mathilde Ollivier connected so much with the character that she did everything necessary, such as learning Spanish, to be chosen.‘They are three outstanding and instinctive actresses who brought a lot to the film,’ admitted Pedro Martín-Calero, who is already working on two scripts for future projects that share a fantastic element, although not horror.

What attracts Pedro Martín-Calero to the horror genre is its visual capacity, its surrealism, its ability to generate atmospheres that other genres do not provide. The director’s aim for El llanto was to achieve a film with a heavy feeling, through sound or framing, to achieve psychological terror without using physical scares. ‘We tried to make the terror when it appears change the lives of the characters. The idea was to build up the tension and we opted to make an ending that escaped the genre and was more emotional; to find a balance between a delicate ending without being naïve’.

A co-production between Spain, France and Argentina, shot in Madrid, Buenos Aires and La Plata, the producers gathered at the presentation, Fernanda del Nido (Setembro Cine), Cristina Zumárraga (Tándem Films), Eduardo Villanueva (Caballo Films), and Gervasio Iglesias (RTVE) agreed on the difficulty of making a project by a first-time director that had the dimension of a commercial film. Although they had the advantage of having Ester Expósito in the cast to gain the necessary confidence in its commercial potential, it required the ‘need to join forces’ and ‘a process of financial engineering at the production level’.

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