Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil (2017)

directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo
Spain/France
93 minutes
3.5 stars out of 5
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I'd been anticipating this for a while now, and it was a big surprise when it got put up on Netflix. It's based on a Basque folktale, which is really neat because the world could use more movies in Basque. I hear the English dub is terrible so do watch it with subtitles if you are not a Basque speaker.

This movie had a totally different atmosphere than I expected. The most striking thing about it is that the titular devil is literally a devil, as in red skin, a tail, horns, and a pitchfork, and this is played utterly straight. If you're like me and you expected this film to be dead serious, the appearance of a literal archetypical cartoon devil can be almost comical, but in the end I loved it. And it makes sense too- at the point in time in which this movie is set, people would be expecting the devil to look like that, and so of course demons would appear in the form people fear the most. Today they might disguise themselves as any number of things, but in the mid-1800s the standard image of a horned devil was enough to frighten.

The fact that this doesn't take itself 100% seriously is really great, because I believe it feels more like folklore that way, since folktales are usually a bit nonsensical. It isn't a comedy by any means, and don't get me wrong, it's still got a lot of brutality and darkness in it, but it also portrays devils as not immune to humanity: this is a creature that goes nuts if you spill chickpeas around him, because he's compelled to count them all; a creature who can be annoyed by being poked and prodded by a small girl. This isn't a devil who's above it all, suave, dangerous; he's a flesh-and-blood dude who happens to have the job of being super evil, and gets really tired of dealing with humans after a while.

I don't know if Alex de la Iglesia had much to do with this outside of "presenting" it, but it actually does feel a lot like a film of his, and that was something I personally wasn't fond of. I like Alex de la Iglesia a lot, he's got great films (mostly), but I thought that sometimes the violence in Errementari felt out of place, although that thought could just be a holdover from me thinking this was going to be a moody slow-burn. Basically it's best to go into this with little to no expectations, and familiarity with the original folktale might help as well. Uma Bracaglia as Usue is absolutely great and doesn't feel like she's trapped within the "plucky orphan" trope at all.