The horrors of the cinema of possessions are almost always based on Catholic tradition, and the fight against demons by Roman rituals. But there are other cultures that enrich this subgenre, and ‘The Old Ways’, a Modest New Horror Movie That Made Netflix’s Top 10 This Week, tries to take a different turn based on Mexican traditions, looking for its indigenous roots. Something that is not the most common.
Director Christopher Alender and screenwriter Marcos Gabriel, ‘The Old Ways’, manage to offer a fresh take on the theme through an exploration of the loss of roots through the story of investigative reporter Cristina (Brigitte Kali Canales), who returns to its place of origin in Veracruz to investigate a story of witchcraft and healing which is consistent with the exorcism of her mother, which she witnessed as a child, but an excursion to a cave, known to be a hotspot for sinister presences, knocks her unconscious.
Aztec pop shamanism
When she wakes up, Christina finds herself in a place she doesn’t know, kidnapped by Luz (Julia Vera) and her son Javi (Sal López). Unable to communicate with her captors, losing her mother tongue, Cristina must go through a series of rituals ranging from burning sage to consuming goat’s milk that become further muddied when she begins to doubt her sanity.
‘The Old Ways’, presented last Sitges 2020, begins in a monotonous way, but as the maelstrom of malevolence increases, the scares and impact images are increasingly intense so that not a crushed vision of this kind of movies. Although everything happens in the same room, disturbing dreams, flashbacks from the past, and the revelation of secrets keep the narrative alive.
![a twist to the cinema of exorcisms in Netfli Oldways3](https://i.blogs.es/aa2c65/oldways3/450_1000.jpg)
Also has a competent invoice and a few clever ideas, such as the way in which Cristina’s character is treated and how doubts are sown about her real condition and the game to leave the door open for the claims about her to be true or not. There are also elements of the film of strangers in a strange land that question the Mexican origin of the protagonist, exposing the traditional beliefs around her as something completely extraterrestrial.
An evil detox “clinic”
‘The Old Ways’ shows quite a bit of creativity in exposing these methods, although many ideas that explore the space of possession seem to be drawn directly from it. the most abstract scenes of exorcisms from the extraordinary official series of ‘The Exorcist’, of which he repeats some minor details, actually like many other current proposals such as’ Evil ‘or the recent one’The seventh day‘.
But the ecstasy of some rites, in this case, rivals the ones we can see in some Shaw brothers shamanic wars movies, which lately are recovering in Korean cinema, with a confrontation of Taoism and the fascinating Catholic religion that here has a small indigenous response, without reaching the madness extremes of oriental cinema, but resulting in a pretty decent horror movie having consider what appears on the platform.
![a twist to the cinema of exorcisms in Netfli Oldways4](https://i.blogs.es/37e1d0/oldways4/450_1000.jpg)
‘The Old Ways’ recovers interest in the exploited cinema of exorcisms, using ancestral possessions inside a cell, as a detoxification of the devil, but neither advances nor gives a radical change to the subgenre. It is a medium festival product that improves when carried away by Latin pop shamanism and it manages to get out of the mud of its first half, with some somewhat unnecessary structure repetitions that prevent it from being more than an hour and a half decent and entertaining that would have been a great chapter in some recent horror anthology.