‘You Are Not Me’ Review: A Gift to the Christmas Horror Canon
A commonality of queer existence is a subtle yet pernicious sense of isolation in ostensibly safe spaces from family dinners to work meetings to even the doctor’s office. Regularly innocuous otherwise, there are moments where one’s queerness feels pronounced, unspoken—whether anyone says anything, they’re certainly thinking about you and your sexuality. Marisa Crespo and Moisés Romera’s You Are Not Me, an official selection of 2023’s Fantastic Fest, certainly has more on its mind than family dysfunction, though it’s those quieter moments that elevate You Are Not Me to the sleeper horror hit of the year.
Aitana (Roser Tapias) and Gabi (Yapoena Silva) plan an early, impromptu surprise at Aitana’s family’s home (compound, really) for the Christmas holiday. Their new baby is in tow, appropriately cute and vulnerable. But Hallmark bliss is shattered first with an ominous accident on the road, and second with an incredulously cold response from Aitana’s family. Her surprise arrival is an inconvenience, not a welcome gift.
Even stranger, Aitana has been uncomfortably usurped by Romanian refugee, Nadia (Anna Kurika). The strange woman is wearing her clothes, sleeping in her bedroom, and the recipient of the parental love Aitana has clearly been lacking. Her mother, Dori (Pilar Almeria) is especially pointed in her criticism, working tirelessly with a finely tuned, plausible deniability to suggest Aitana isn’t welcome there. So much so, even Gabi insists Aitana is overreacting—certainly her parents don’t mean any harm.
And that notion of do no harm, especially refracted through a queer lens, augments You Are Not Me’s most deliciously tense moments. The film takes a good while, nearly an hour, before arriving at the more overt horror elements, the destination of which will be obvious to anyone who’s ever seen a horror movie before. There are sprinkles of doppelganger horror You Are Not My Mother and chamber thriller The Apology, though You Are Not Me excels most in its Post-A24 era of social tension, even as it, oddly enough, goes full-tilt The Last Exorcism in its final moments.
Nadia wearing Aitana’s wedding dress, for instance, isn’t just foreshadowing for the horrors to come, but a striking, painful rejoinder from her parents, a reminder of the heterosexual marriage Aitana abandoned to shack up with a woman. At several points, Aitana shares how isolated she feels, and in no uncertain terms is reminded that her queerness is responsible. The extra twist of the knife? Her sexuality is regularly reduced to a decision she made, something she imposed on her family, rather than what it really is.
Everything adjacent to Aitana is more familiar, though still fittingly hypnotic and unsettling. There’s geriatric sex rendered monstrous, a heaping of jump scares to keep the pulses racing, and plenty of boundary-blurring nightmares awash in reverberating red lights. Joan Vilà’s score, while occasionally distracting, opting for an odd television procedural rhythm during tense moments, mostly works, especially when it leans heavily into its Christmas origins. Think “Carol of the Bells”, but make it horrifying.
Melding cult horror and family drama (and trauma) with an isolated slow burn, You Are Not Me quietly emerges as one of the year’s finest horror movies. Painfully real, uncomfortably tense, and sufficiently bloody when it counts, Marisa Crespo and Moisés Romera’s holiday from hell is a gathering worth attending. Some of the courses served will feel and taste too familiar, but there’s a flavor all its own hidden beneath. You Are Not Me, but you are one of the best horror movies, international or otherwise, of the year.
You Are Not Me is in Theaters and On Digital on Friday, December 6, 2024.
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You Are Not Me
Summary
One of the finest queer horror movies of the year, You Are Not Me is a gift to the Christmas horror canon.
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