“Ego” (2021): I have met the Enemy and it is ME!

 

Synopsis

Confined to her apartment during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, Paloma, a young Spanish woman, goes on a dating site designed for women seeking other women. Before long she meets a lookalike, who begins to impersonate her with diabolical persistence, driving Paloma to track down the doppelganger and end the nightmare.

The Good

I must really like flicks upon which it is hard to hang a handle. I keep watchin’ the damn things!

Take the latest among my confounding continuum, the new Spanish psychological horror brain scrambler “Ego”.

Good movie. Taught, tense and terrifying.

Great performances. María Pedraza as Paloma startles as a young woman riddled with incapacitating mental illness. She is bombarded with horrific and realistic visions, some appearing to be of herself, which she can neither control nor comprehend.

Well filmed and directed. Superb scenes of a stay-at-home, pandemic-gutted Madrid, eerily empty streets and a spookily silent skyline.

The Bad

The preceding so stated, shout out to Alfonso Cortés-Cavanillas…

¿Qué pasa, hombre?!

And he oughta know. Dude directed this perplexing puzzler.

A Checklist Chock-Full

What ACC gives us here are parts and pieces of the following:

*COVID-induced stir craziness

*Consumptive Emotional Disorder

*Pulverizing PTSD in the wake of traumatic loss

*Society’s pill-popping panacea predilection

*Doppelganger delirium

and…

*a Cyndi Lauper dance break

Wow. Wait.

Huh?

Carving through the Clutter

Oh, there’s more, my friend. Trust me. But this is sufficient summation of the salient subjects.

In the end, “Ego” may put one, as it did me, in this frame of mind (after you’ve knocked yourself up side of the head a couple times to recalibrate):

Suicide is the ultimate act of self-absorption. Ergo, ego.

And it’s sinister success, a lifetime sentence for loved ones haunted forever by the demons of devastation.

Overall

Let it be known that Cortés-Cavanillas does offer his audience hope, ending “Ego” with a mesmerizing final image that seems to suggest spirits set free and soaring toward the Heavens. 

And that perhaps Paloma is not alone in her emergence from suffering.

I invite you to enjoy all of my entertaining and eclectic film reviews as “The Quick Flick Critic”, continually updated at https://thequickflickcritic.blogspot.com/