‘Crazy Old Lady’ Review: The Gothic Fury of Carmen Maura
When a worried daughter asks her ex to check on her unstable mother for one night, what begins as an awkward favor turns into a nightmare. In an old, decaying mansion, buried traumas resurface and reality dissolves into madness.
Although Crazy Old Lady marks Martín Mauregui’s first solo feature as a director, he’s hardly a newcomer to Argentine cinema. A founding member of La Unión de los Ríos, Mauregui co-directed El amor (Primera parte) alongside Alejandro Fadel, Santiago Mitre, and Juan Schnitman in 2005, and has worked as a screenwriter with filmmakers like Pablo Trapero, Walter Salles, Mariano Llinás, Federico Veiroj, Daniel Hendler, Santiago Palavecino, and Damián Szifron, among others. After several ambitious projects that never materialized, he finally arrives at his debut feature as both a seasoned insider and a newcomer at once.
Vieja Loca is, in its own way, a fairly traditional horror film—one that respects certain gothic conventions of the genre. It starts off deceptively light, even flirting with dark comedy, before gradually sinking into something far more disturbing. Mauregui plays with themes of mental instability, buried trauma, and family violence. With echoes of Misery and other psychological captivity thrillers, his unsettling, claustrophobic film unfolds as a nightmarish series of events that spiral into despair. Playful at times, yes—but despair all the same.
The story begins innocently enough. Laura (Agustina Liendo) is driving with her daughter while fielding the incessant, repetitive phone calls of her mother, Alicia (Carmen Maura). The elderly woman obsessively repeats the same questions and rambles about a supposed ex-lover who never existed, making it clear her grip on reality is slipping. Exasperated, Laura’s daughter urges her grandmother to take her medication, but Alicia refuses. Concerned, Laura asks her ex, Pedro (Daniel Hendler), to spend the night with Alicia since no one else can look after her. Pedro agrees—without realizing what he’s walking into.
At first, Alicia’s eccentric behavior seems merely odd, even darkly humorous. But when she refuses to take the pill Pedro offers and begins to confuse him with the same ex-lover, things take a dark turn. She insists Pedro is that man—and soon starts accusing him of terrible acts, some of them against her. From that delusion onward, Alicia takes full control of the situation, turning Pedro’s life into a waking nightmare from which he can’t escape.
Set almost entirely within a large, decaying mansion straight out of gothic tradition, Crazy Old Lady traps its characters—and the viewer—in an escalating spiral of confusion, confrontation, and physical menace. As the story progresses, the film plunges headlong into torture and violence, with Alicia exacting revenge on a man she believes once harmed her. But is there any truth to her story, or is it all delirium and projection?
A co-production with Spain, backed by none other than J.A. Bayona, Vieja Loca ultimately becomes a portrait of Alicia herself—a woman broken by trauma who refuses to remain a victim. From sexual provocation that unsettles the timid Pedro to verbal and physical cruelty, Alicia seems to have lost her reason, allowing long-repressed demons to surface with ferocious freedom.
Technically, the film is a cut above most local horror productions. Mauregui’s collaborators—starting with cinematographer Julián Apezteguía—bring a level of sophistication and visual precision that elevate the material. Their ingenuity keeps the central confrontation from becoming static or stagey. The sense of claustrophobia may feel overwhelming, but that seems entirely intentional. What’s more debatable is the film’s flirtation with torture porn: an overused trope that, while coherent within the story, occasionally feels excessive.
Still, that tension—how much one can endure from a woman who, despite her twisted logic, acts out with manic fury—is precisely the core of Crazy Old Lady. When a pair of secondary characters (Camila Peralta and Ezequiel Díaz) unexpectedly enter the house, the viewer’s moral compass is shaken once again: whose side are we on? It’s in that moral disorientation that Mauregui finds the true horror of his disturbing and relentless debut.
