Netflix is known for having an odd mixture of things. You never know what hidden treasure, or horror, you may find the deeper you scroll through. Semi-recently, there was a Netflix phenomenon that took Twitter by storm, horror movie “Veronica.”
Having nothing better to do one night I set out to watch “Veronica” with my fiancé and his friend. We had heard that the movie was so intensely frightening that viewers were turning it off halfway through. People were even live-tweeting their reactions when watching the Spanish film. Since it generated quite the online buzz we thought it couldn’t possibly be that bad. We were wrong.
Supposedly loosely based on a true story, the movie is set in 1991 in Madrid where a barely teenage Veronica has taken care of her younger siblings since the passing of their father. During a solar eclipse, Veronica and two of her schoolmates sneak off to the school basement to use a Ouija board to contact her father. At the peak of the eclipse the glass shatters and Veronica enters a trance of sorts then passes out. Upon returning home Veronica is left to babysit her siblings. It is then that she begins to feel the presence of evil and pick up on slight changes. Yet she remains unaware of the horrific outcome awaiting her.
While this movie contains an onslaught of moving objects, freaky sound effect, breathing in the dark, shadowy unnatural figures, and a chain-smoking blind nun, it certainly did not live up to the hype. We found ourselves drifting off and doing other things out of boredom throughout the whole film. I don’t even really know why we finished it. The “plot twist” at the end was predictable even without fully paying attention. The acting was decent and the sound effects and special effects were okay. Maybe if it were 10 years ago we might have been a little more freaked out, but we all slept soundly through the night after watching “Veronica.” Perhaps people were turning it off halfway through because it was too dull and not because it was too scary.