Coven (2020)

At the height of the Spanish Inquisition, "Rostegui" (Alex Brendemühl) has been charged by the King with rooting out the witchery that allegedly prevails amidst his 17th century Basque country. Allied with his notary (Daniel Fanego), a zealous young priest (Asier Oruesagasti) and a few soldiers his job is to specifically apprehend young women who may be privy to the secret rites that can conjure Satan from the depths to corrupt their bodies and their souls. His latest suspects are a group of nubile teenagers whom he is perfectly happy to have tortured until they either confess or are proved to be evil by rather probing and brutal bodily investigations. "Ana" (Amaia Aberasturi) might have read the tales of "Shéhérezade" though, as she convinces the others that their only hope of survival is to string out this process long enough for their fathers - fishing at sea - to return and rescue them. She's lucky in that her captor is captivated by her, and she knows how to capitalise on that but the longer their stalling goes on the more suspicious he becomes that not only are they really witches - as they have now acknowledged out of desperation, but they are preparing for their Sabbath dance so as to either escape or perhaps even entrap him in their sinister ritual. If you ever saw Vincent Price's "Witchfinder General" from 1968, then you may already appreciate that many of the techniques used to separate guilt and innocence in these cases resulted in death - either by being proven a witch or dying in the process of proving that you weren't. Well there is plenty of that here, too, as the torturers exact a maximum of suffering from these girls thereby ensuring that they'd probably confess to being penguins if he'd asked. The production is largely set amidst flame-lit darkness and the sexually-charged history shines a potently evocative light on the superstitions of the time and on the church's hypocritical domination of politics based on fear, ignorance and violence against an uneducated populus - and that could include those conducting the inquisition - all too eager to conform to the supposed wishes of Jesus Christ and/or his father. Aberasturi delivers suggestively as she combines a survival insect with the role of manipulatrix-cum-tempress and by the denouement I wasn't entirely sure if perhaps "Padre Cristóbal" might not have been right all along... All of that said, though, I found the actual story a little too undercooked as were the characterisations and it does rely a little more on the imagery - which can be a quite repetitive - rather than immerse us more in the terror of this state-sponsored culling of it's own people. Still, it's provocative and well worth ninety minutes.