In online release, the Spanish horror "On the Threshold of Death", in which the anticipation of the finale clearly exceeds the final result.

The film "On the Threshold of Death" begins with shocking footage of an elderly woman's suicide on a monstrously hot day in a small Spanish town. The unexpected and inexplicable death of Rosa (Ángela López Gamonal) stuns her relatives: her son Mario (Gustavo Salmerón), his new wife Lina (Irene Anula), and his teenage daughter Naya. And Mario's elderly father, Rosa's husband Manuel (Sorion Egileor), loses his mind from the stress. The man either starts muttering eerie predictions or, as if nothing happened, turns into a smiling grandfather amiably chatting with his granddaughter about his and grandma's youth.

Mario decides to take his father home to care for him, but Lina, who initially agreed to the plan, eventually begins to fear Manuel, who does not hide his hostile attitude toward her.

Gradually, along with the temperature outside (the city is experiencing an abnormal heatwave of nearly 50 degrees Celsius), the atmosphere in the house begins to heat up: the grandfather's condition worsens and he behaves even more frighteningly, Lina throws tantrums and demands that the father be placed in a nursing home, Mario weakly resists but more often simply avoids the problem, preferring to spend time at the bar. And Naya, though she loves her grandfather, wants even more to spite her stepmother, so she takes her father's side.

The rather long exposition of "On the Threshold of Death" with a couple of undeniably frightening scenes (which is already common for modern horrors) is intended, according to the creators, to take a deeper look at the characters, get used to them, and grasp the motives of their behavior. At some point, the horror elements will recede into the background, giving way to quite ordinary family squabbles during a difficult life moment. Lina is pregnant and has quit smoking, so she is constantly on edge; Naya is growing up and doesn't want to go where her parents send her; Mario is temporarily unable to support the family, and then there's this tragedy with grandma. The temperature counter in the off-screen title will constantly tick up, rhyming with the escalating atmosphere in the family.

All this might have worked as intended if the Spanish directors Raúl Cerezo and Fernando González Gómez had the right balance at hand. Diving headlong into family squabbles, the authors suddenly, without warning, start switching registers and oscillating from drama to satire, from science fiction to surrealism, from social subtext to absurdist comedy.

No one can ultimately coherently explain what is happening on screen, nor the motives of individual family members. Except for a small scene where the grandfather enthusiastically recounts that his wife was a proud person and obeyed no one. This will ultimately be the only circumstance that, closer to the end, helps to understand why everything happened the way it did at the beginning.

But to get there, you have to watch almost half the film and endure another memorable moment when, during a pleasant dinner conversation, Manuel suddenly blurts out: "Tomorrow you will all die." This looks more like another episode from a comedy about the loser Fantozzi than a horror element, and it sticks in the memory much better than the rest.

Visually, "On the Threshold of Death" works as a fairly typical, trope-breaking slow-burner with a mandatory exploration of trauma and a weighty thought that old age is inevitable and one just needs to get used to it, and the younger generation should treat it with respect, because loneliness in old age is not a pleasant thing.

The directors do not overdo it with jump scares and moderately escalate the atmosphere. Alarming violins sound, infernal shadows lurk in doorways, and a sharp camera turn promises an encounter with something more terrifying. At times, given this, it works as intended, but much more often it is completely in vain. The pluses also include the completely ambiguous ending of the film, which rather stuns than tries to explain anything.

Ivan Kilyakov

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In the end, the anticipation of the resolution is the only thing that makes you watch "On the Threshold of Death" to the end, but the final result does not justify this expectation and even disappoints in some ways. Questions in this film are somehow not usually paid attention to, because the answers, most likely, no one simply knows.