Parvulos: Children of the Apocalypse Review – Toxic Parenting

An antivax zombie horror that's even scarier than RFK Jr.

The Mexican horror movie Parvulos is like an evil Pokemon.

At first, it puts you in a comfort zone with its cute, familiar appearance. It seems like something you've seen before and can handle, because you know its limits.

At a certain stage, it levels up into a new form, growing teeth and claws that it can sink into you a little bit more. You acclimatize to this slightly more savage, yet still whimsical incarnation.

Finally, it powers up into god mode, and it has you at its mercy. It's a beast intent on wrecking, and it will tear down everything in the path. All sense of decency and morality has left it, and I mean that in a good way. If you'd consider that an insult, though, Parvulos is probably more than you can handle.

Footage of unforgiving woods sets the stage for a post-zombie apocalypse tale of three brothers. Farid Escalante Correa is Salvador, the eldest, a teenager missing one of his legs below the knee. Leonardo Cervantes is Oliver, the glasses-wearing middle kid who's just learning how to be ruthless in an uncaring world, and Mateo Ortega Casillas is Benjamin, the littlest kid who still needs bedtime stories and isn't ready for the horrible truths of the world yet. Their parents have apparently left for an indefinite period, and there's a monster chained up in the basement that roars. If you read the entirety of that preceding sentence carefully, you'll probably put two and two together before Benjamin does.

The zombies, or technically “infected,” draw on anti-vaxer fears. In this world, like ours, there was a devastating pandemic, and vaccines were distributed, but as the disease mutated, an upgraded vaccine had side-effects worse than the cure, turning people into mindless, flesh-eating monsters (who still somehow remember how to do it doggy-style). Should we be mad at a horror movie for seemingly embracing the RFK Jr. mindset? Sure, if you like. Just rest assured that it's ultimately a minor point in a movie that's determined to smash a lot of taboos and leave you shaken. It'd be like being offended by Terrifier for besmirching the good name of clowns. This is, after all, a movie that has zombie-fucking, and they're screamers, too.

For approximately the first third of the movie, though, it feels like a clever way to shoot somebody's vacation cabin for a movie about an apocalypse unglimpsed. Every aspiring filmmaker has thought of something like that, and the desaturated, almost black-and-white cinematography helps it all feel barren. Nonetheless, it does feel like it might cheat us of actually seeing anything scary...until it doesn't. I probably shouldn't reveal the obvious “surprise” in the basement, but what becomes of it is less obvious – the family decides to have the most bizarre, grotesque Christmas party since Terrifier 3, at which point the movie's first evolution happens, from standard-issue survival horror to pitch-black comedy.

Pushing things even further is the arrival of Valeria (Carla Adell), an age-appropriate love interest for Salvador, who may never have even seen a real girl. (The one movie the family owns is the hilariously random Robin Wright film The Congress, all about the selling of one's likeness to generative AI.) When Valeria and Salvador get it on, the film delves into some pretty no-holds-barred commentary on the extent to which Catholic parents find violence less troubling than sex, and we start to get a handle on the level of satire that director Isaac Ezban is going for.

Throughout the film, characters mention an exterior threat called “the trumpets,” but don't explain – why would they, given that they live in this world? It's only us in the audience who don't get the reference, though viewers well-versed in Revelation may catch on quicker. Valeria reveals more about the world outside, if she can be trusted, and brings the trumpets up again; it's a whole lot of planting for a payoff that increases the movie's intensity to its final form, demonstrating that everyone can be a savage and upping the ante on the destructive nature of groupthink by way of religion. For a premise that began as arguably antivax, it goes all the way in the other direction by the end, en route to a dark – but not irredeemable – finale.

Parvulos is Ezban's fifth film, but his first to get U.S. distribution. It shouldn't be his last – like the French wave of extreme horror some years back, this feels like the sort of movie that will be beloved by fear-flick fans, though perhaps few others will be up to the challenge of watching (among other gory moments) a dog get killed, skinned, and butchered for eating. (A friendly dog, at that.) That's not just a trigger warning I'm giving you – it's the movie's first cue that the characters are living in uncivilized times, and a test to see if you're up for what follows.

I tend to hammer the notion that horror movies need catharsis even if they're ultimately downbeat, or they don't really help us deal with our fears as the best ones do. Parvulos does indeed have that key moment – it's effectively about the pandemic, yes, and probably the pandemics to come with all our health infrastructure being dismantled. But unlike reality, it does offer its characters a metaphorical ability to punch the pandemic in the face, so to speak, as we all wish we could. And in a very fucked-up kind of way, it also emphasizes that love and compassion for family specifically (and no-one else, LOL!), even when it feels futile, might save your ass when everything else has turned to shit, including religion.

Are we all children of the apocalypse? Not yet, at least. But our mindset is getting there, and Parvulos suggests that even the best-prepared will have to endure nigh-unbearable loss to prevail.

Parvulos: Children of the Apocalypse opens in theaters Friday. Images courtesy of Firebook Entertainment.