The most striking thing about The Legend of Romasanta is the unspeakable stance of director Francisco ‘Paco’ Plaza, whose previous experience with horror was in 2002 as the Ramsay Campbell adaptation of Second Name. The Legend of Romasanta claims to be based on the true story of a 19th century Spanish salesman, Manuel Blanco Romasanta, who seduced many women and killed them in a gruesome way. He was finally captured and tried in Allariz in 1852, where he justified his murders by saying that he was a werewolf and that his nature was to hunt.
The plot of the movie is quite simple. Set in the Galicia region of Spain in the early 1850s, the film tells the harrowing story of a district plagued by a series of brutal murders apparently committed by a wolf. A British professor is entrusted with the task of tracking down those responsible for the murders by the judiciary. Then the focus shifts to a family who, like everyone else, lives in perpetual fear of the wolf. The older sister María goes with the street vendor Manual Romasanta to marry him along with her daughter Teresa. Once they reach the forest, Romasanta kills both Teresa and Maria and returns to seduce Barbara, the younger sister. After she receives a sniper’s bullet to save her life, he sleeps with her. She becomes suspicious of him when he gave her an expensive jewel gift and goes searching his caravan only to discover proof that his sister and niece are dead along with many others. Romasanta tries to kill her, but the mysterious hunter Antonio, who had previously tried to shoot Romasanta, saves her and explains that both he and Romasanta are werewolves and have killed many in collusion. But he changed his mind and now he wants to kill Romasanta. After Antonio turns himself in to the authorities, Barbara helps the police locate and arrest Romasanta. In the courtroom, his only defense is that he is a werewolf.
Intrigued by the unusual story and the filmmakers’ claims that it was a true story, I tried to find out more about Manuel Blanco Romasanta on the internet. Unfortunately, all searches resulted in reviews of the film as far as the English reference material is concerned. On Wikipedia in Spanish, there seems to be an entry for Romasanta, but my lack of knowledge of the Spanish language prevented me from finding out more. Despite some incidents of anachronism, like a professor lecturing on genetics alongside phrenology in 1851, while no one had heard the word until 1905 and the idea of DNA didn’t even exist until the 1950s, the apparent sense of credibility history of the film remains intact. .
Compared to many other films dealing with the subject of werewolves, Romasanta is a far superior attempt, all due to director Paco Plaza’s exquisitely rich staging sense. Brilliant cinematography of richly textured minutiae from 19th century rural Spain and vivid detail like a burning caravan racing through a dark forest with Barbara inside, Romasanta heating up the fat in the woods immediately after the gloomy scene of corpses found without body fat, evokes a story that is eminently moving. Another plus is that nothing is explained to the audience and, for the most part, they are left alone to discover various disparate elements. It takes some time before random scenes like Barbara’s firing from her sister, the district attorney’s investigation, Antonio’s attempts to kill Romasanta, and Barbara’s seduction begin to make sense.
The choice of actors is another aspect of the film that makes it highly visible. With his experience in horror movies, Julian Sands has acquired a way of expressing an overexcited character. At first, he is a charming, helpful and caring man. The audience is shocked to turn around when he blinds the bird and lets him die, dismissing him as “It’s just a bird.” His sexually charged threat is palpable in later scenes. His powerful performance keeps audiences spellbound, who are as drawn to him as they are rejected by him. The final scene between him and Elsa Pataky is the most powerful performance of him and the beautiful actress.
The only way they could have enhanced this documentary fantasy was by playing more with the ambiguity of the central character’s claims. In the absence of any witness to a man turning into a wolf, it stands to reason that the audience rejects Romasanta’s historical claim that he was a werewolf. It would be easier to accept that he was either a sociopath who killed to satisfy his instincts and made money off his victims by selling his belongings and soap made from his body fat or suffered from some delusion or psychological compulsion. If the movie had competed more between the rational and the supernatural, it would have been even better.
But we must admit that Romasanta got even more gripping at a point where an ordinary werewolf movie might have ended. Romasanta’s sighting and arrest turns the movie in a fascinating direction. The courtroom scene where Romasanta acquits himself of any responsibility for all the murders by claiming he was a werewolf, and then the scene where he is hypnotized and pushed back by the professor to reenact the murders, succeeded by the claims of the professor that he could cure Romasanta of lycanthropy are quite fascinating.
In a sea of werewolf movies, this one stands out. Powerful visuals and vivid detail continue to haunt you long after the movie ends.
