KM 31: Kilómetro 31
Rigoberto Castañeda, 2006, Mexico-Spain
This starts off decently enough, helped by a drained colour palate where everything is moody greys and blues and helped by a lot of black. Woman driving home through a deserted country road appears to hit a child, but the child isn’t dead… and then she is. Perhaps the Twin Sisters With Psychic Bond and Dark Past ought to be a clue that we might be in trouble, viewer, but it is only really when our troubled protagonist and her man run into The Old Lady of Exposition that it becomes clear that “KM 13” is a total mess of plot, has lost its sense of foreboding for increasingly cheaper shocks and effects.
Oh, and the old lady is a ghost, which insults so much and is so obvious that any viewer is likely to go from mild curiosity to openly snorting at the unravelling narrative and suspense, such as they were. Indicative of the overall sloppiness is how one moment they are running out to the haunted road, and the next they have to take cars and taxis. And the lighting becomes similarly arbitrary: the woodland is dark one moment and then impossibly lit by Kleig lights the next. And what is the point of having a sewer showdown if it’s lit to banish any hint of shadow? The showdown is moreorless the protagonist standing in the sewers staring at desperate special effects, the kind of ghostly visions that were the highlight of ropey old “Ghost Story” and a hundred derivatives, but are so rote and badly presented here that there is not even any room to enjoy cliché or take it as so-bad-it’s-good amusement.
