Silencio (Silence)

A Vampire’s Tale Bleeding Stigma: A Candy-Colored War Cry Against Silence.

Eduardo Casanova is one of those rare contemporary directors who can pierce straight through the ribcage, straight into the heart, and then twist—all while swaddling the wound in an ironically grotesque, sugar-coated pink.

In “Pieles” and “La Piedad,” he served up agony wrapped like a poisoned bonbon. With “Silencio” (Silence), he’s at it again—only this time, the aftertaste is sharper, more political, and bloodier.

It’s a three-part mini-series—or, more truthfully, a short feature split into acts—that still wears Casanova’s signature palette of bubblegum dream, camp horror, and mischief.

But here, that aesthetic coats a furious social commentary on the AIDS pandemic.

The premise? A coven of female vampires discovers that their “supply” of uncontaminated human blood is running dry.

Beneath that pulp setup lies a critique as pointed as a fang: the disease has not gone away, but the headlines have. And in the silence, the stigma metastasises.

Casanova, never shy about his politics, has said: “When we talk about the AIDS epidemic, the focus is on gay men—even though this disease doesn’t recognise gender.

These days, you can’t enter 48 countries if you are living with HIV. It’s the stigma that you can’t die from but messes with the minds of afflicted people.”

The series takes the old activist slogan Silence = Death and reframes it as both a warning and a lament.

Casanova also turns his gaze to the women erased from the conversation: his vampire sisters cling to survival, their hunger shadowed by the more dangerous ache of falling in love—especially with a human.

Tonally, its Romeo and Juliet dipped in formaldehyde, drained of the luxury of a happy ending.

Casanova jumps from moments of real horror—the kind that comes when love curdles into rejection—to absurd, delirious interludes where his long-fanged heroines burst into full-blown musical numbers. That disorienting blend of menace and camp is his calling card.

Visually, the first two chapters explode in hyper-saturated colour, every frame a pink pop-art fever dream. When the blood finally sprays across the lens, it lands like a slasher’s punchline and a kind of cathartic gasp.

Then, in the finale, he slams the brakes. Shot on grainy 16mm as a nod to cine quinqui—Spain’s gritty, marginalised cinema of the late ’70s and ’80s—the palette drains to darker tones of brown and red, grounding it in late-’80s reality.

The cast—Leticia Dolera, María León, Ana Polvorosa, Omar Ayuso, and Lucía Díez—sink their teeth into the material with relish. In the opener, they deliver pitch-black comedy so sharp you’ll laugh until it hurts, all while sporting prosthetic designs that could be this year’s cult Halloween look.

“Silencio” is a candy-coloured scream. It’s grotesque and hilarious, political and personal, impossible to look away from and impossible to shake off.

Casanova isn’t asking for your silence—he’s daring you to choke on it.

WATCHED AT:

Locarno Film Festival 78