Macabre…ish Horror Review: Trauma
Trauma, 2018/ 106 min
It’s 1978 in Chile, a bloody woman is strapped to a chair under guard and a pantless man is dragged away after being executed, another is hauled in and forced to rape the woman, it’s her son. He is threatened when he resists, injected and forced onto his mother. She tries comforting him and asks him to look after his sister. When she is executed, guards force him to continue, he vomits, loses his mind and continues abusing her corpse.
Every captive in the building is being tortured and accused of communism. The background sounds are all screams, wails and shots.
- Present Day •
Some girlfriends are going on a family vacation. On the way they stop a tavern to ask for directions and are immediately surrounded by a bunch of weird, creepy men. One is a lot more concerning than the rest and now he knows where they’re going. And on the way out they run into a little girl and the local cops. Then continue on to the house.
Meanwhile, something terrible is still happening to women in the area. And it’s happening in a dark abandoned, decaying building.
There are horrifying flashbacks of a man being forced to abuse an infant. The dark, decaying place is in the flashbacks. The really creepy old man from the tavern is the young man who was forced to rape his mother and groomed to be a monster by another monster. But he did keep his promise to his mother to take care of his sister, if you want to call it that, she’s kept in this crumbling fortress in shackles. The man also has an adult son now and the grooming, abuse and horror continues, it’s tradition now.
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Unfortunately, for the vacationing women, they have visitors at the house and it’s gonna be one of the worst nights on their lives. That night all of the women are brutalized by the depraved old man and his sadistic son. And it lasts until morning. The next morning the women wake up, tied up and after one of them slips her restraints, and tries but fails to kill the intruders in their sleep, she kills herself.
The father-son duo leave and the women call the police and the police make a plan. That turns out to be a terrible one because it costs a lot of people their lives and the duo still get away. But not before they liberate the women from the back of the police truck and kidnapping a little girl.
The women cannot just let them get away so they and what’s left of the local cops go to the depraved, sadistic duos’ lair.
There is no bottom to their depravity and if the women do not escape or die, their lives will just amount to daily suffering. It’s gonna be a blood bath.
This Spanish horror film was directed by Lucio A. Rojas and unfortunately this movie is based on a true story, that of the militant dictatorship of Chile’s former leader, Pinochet. Look into it if you don’t already know about it, it was a horrifying time in Chile’s history.
This movie is far more graphic and grotesque than I have described in my synopsis. It’s incredibly gory and there are a lot of scenes that are painful to watch. There is some bad blood splatter and wound cgi but not more than that. Also, there are kids and infants in this movie but any abuse is only suggested, not explicit but it’s well understood. There are no graphic scenes with children or babies in it.
If nothing else, horror has always been a great medium to explore the vast landscape of human depravity and this is one of many movies that proves it. The actors are phenomenal in this film by the way. Bravo for being able to pull this off.