Origin Unknown – review

Director: Rigoberto Castañeda

Release date: 2020

Contains spoilers

Hitting the 2020 festivals – notably Frightfest in the UK – this is a Mexican vampire movie that ties secretive vampire hunters and the cartel into the action. They come together in a well shot piece that perhaps flinches when it comes to the dénouement.

It starts, however, with a head rolling across the screen after we hear a particularly visceral slashing sound. We are straight into action as a group of vampire hunters and vampires battle it out. Stood in the chaos is a little girl, Lina (Paulina Gil). One of the vampires indicates that she should run as he is stabbed through the heart.

ouija

A cavalcade of black cars run through the countryside. It returns Pedro (Daniel Martínez) and his bodyguards home. In the car he hesitates on a money transfer for $20m US and eventually cancels it. As he gets home, a compound that is a veritable fortress, we discover that he lives with his children the teenage María (Ana Paola Marín) and the younger, and disabled, Beto (Matías del Castillo). Their mother is dead and he is now in a relationship with their Aunty Francis (Lisette Morelos) a fact accepted by Beto, not so much by María. There is a hint of the supernatural from the get-go with Beto using a Ouija that Francis gave him and the planchette moving whilst untouched – it says “She is coming”.

Lisette Morelos as Francis

Arriving at the house are brothers Alan (Horacio Garcia Rojas) and the mute Eric (Ramón Medína). They are part of a cartel and their presence at the house wasn’t that clear to me. Pedro is trying to get out (later Alan confirms the only way out is a high payment or dead) and the $20M he hasn’t yet paid is the severance payment. It seems they brokered the deal for him and he is worried about cartel assassins – so I guess they were there as insurance for him. Later, however, Alan indicates that he was meant to receive the $20m – it’s a tad confused but not that important.

flash of fang

What is important is that the house is surrounded by armed guards and has a state-of-the-art security system. We see Lina in a field, lights behind her, and then there is an alarm that goes off in the house. A guard finds the rear gate has been ripped at and then finds Lina. However the lights draw closer, they are drones, and the guards are attacked with crossbow bolts – one going through the back of Eric’s skull and out of his mouth.

big sword

They lock down the house (though a roof skylight shutter doesn’t shut due to a tree branch – and somehow the system doesn’t detect that). This is where the film needed to tighten up for me, for instance they are now surrounded by tattooed warriors using melee weapons and they have killed all the guards outside – yet they fail to spot María who went for a sneaky smoke just before the attack. The warriors are after Lina, obviously, but she is not yet fully a vampire as she hasn’t drunk live blood.

Lina goes full vamp

So that is the turning aspect. The backstory we get is that she was an orphan, the vampires took her from the orphanage (with a view to turning, it appears) and she had leukaemia. They have drunk from her, given her vampire blood but her body is in turmoil, becoming ill again pending drinking live blood (whether live means not from a vampire or absolutely fresh isn’t elaborated on). When she does feed, she goes full on vampire and takes the fight to the warriors… her speed, her wall and ceiling crawling and her (almost) flight (it might be flight, it might be giant leaps) makes you wonder how the hunters faired so well against adult-sized vampires.

an Arcane

The hunters are called Arcanes and they have been trained from birth to hunt the soulless vampires, which they refer to as strigoï. They have no apparent regard for human life or collateral damage their activity leaves behind, making one question who the bad guys really are. Ok, Lina is warded off by a cross but she at no point threatens to hurt the family (indeed Beto’s mother, on her deathbed, told him that a girl would come who would cure him). The adult vampires (from Lina’s viewpoint) saved her, tried to cure her and did not a lot else except dance. It is an interesting viewpoint – other than Lina being overpowered without reason.

adult vampire

The film is well shot and mostly well-acted. I was less sure of Lina as a vampire then as Paulina Gil’s performance of a hunted and scared girl. The latter worked well but the decision to give her a strange ‘goblin’ voice when vamping out didn’t help and she didn’t carry sinister off when in vampire mode, at least for me. However the action was generally well done and there was some nice gore. The very end of the film contained an aspect that I thought was a tad weak, unfortunately, but I won’t spoil that here. The storyline is fairly simple – vampire hunter home invasion meets members of the cartel – and this works overall. 6.5 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.