Film Review

The Communion Girl (2022) • Shudder

While returning from a nightclub having taken drugs, a new girl in town and her friend find a creepy doll wearing a communion dress…

From The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and [REC] (2007) to The Skin I Live In (2011) and The Platform (2019), Spain’s produced some impressive examples of horror over the last couple of decades. The Communion Girl / La Niña de la Comunión, during its best moments, recalls one of these Spanish masterpieces, The Orphanage (2007), possibly the finest ghost story of this century.

Yet it also recalls dozens of generic movies about spooky dolls and screaming teenagers, and it’s tempting to wonder if this odd combination of profundity and cliché reflects the different backgrounds of its director and writer. Victor Garcia, the director, is Spanish-born but has worked mostly in the US on unremarkable genre fare including Hellraiser: Revelations (2011) and The Damned (2013); while screenwriter Guillem Clua co-wrote the exceptionally smart God’s Crooked Lines (2022) as well as two episodes of the intelligent, multi-layered TV series The Innocent…