Macabre…ish Horror Review: The Dollmaker
The Dollmaker, 2025/ 99 min.
Something bad is happening in Palacios, women are vanishing without a trace. And it all begins and ends with the local video rental store.
One of the employees of the shop is Tomás (Rodrigo Noya). And he is a busy man, working at both, the video store, the local clinic and taking care of his sickly mother. He’s also lonely and yearns for companionship and luckily for him he lives in a bustling place full of possibilities.
Argentina (Griselda Sánchez), Tina from Montecino, is one possibility, she works at the local 1950s diner inspired Drag spot, Trixie’s. But she’s also a patient at the clinic, she has sad stories. She is suffering from the loss of her daughter, she copes with a doll. Also, she often sees terrifying apparitions. Her hallucinations are also audio and they’re pretty bad.
But back to Tomas, after a long day working, he returns home to care for his mother (Alejandra Baldoni), who he’s devoted too. But something is up with Tomas too, he sees things, just for a second, flashes of strange images. So is something off with this friendly, unassuming town or is just the people??
The town also has a jovial cop, Marcos (Santiago Dominguez), the man loves dogs and he doesn’t carry a gun.
The chief of police is of the opinion that just because people are missing, doesn’t mean anything sinister is happening. But something is definitely wrong. Because there is a basement in Palacios that is holding young women captive and most of them will never leave it, alive.
Inspector Porter (Alejo García Pintos) has come to town and he’d like to get to the bottom of the missing women issue, even though the chief and jovial, gunless Marcos seem unconcerned about. He sends Marcos out with flyers and he wants to interrogate some suspects.
Did I mention Tomas has rage issues? He does and he has violent bouts of them. But once he gets it out of his system, he’s fine. One coping mechanism he has, he collects…
and makes dolls.
And the Inspector is making some headway, he finds out the manager of the video store has been pirating movies, they found a body and he does eventually find out what happened to the missing women and who did it. It turns out, all he needed was someone to spill on an old family secret that starts with a tragic accident.
You know what they say, things get worse before they get better. Well, things are about to get a whole lot worse in Palacios.
This film was directed by José María Cicala and it is so eerie, disturbing and very well done. Great practical effects, great cinematography, the music…all of the attention to detail. Even the opening credits are very well done. A lot of hard work went into this film. If you don’t really pay attention to this movie, you’ll miss a lot. It is a Spanish movie, with Spanish audio but it has English subtitles.