#foreign review

Husband and wife move into a house near a canal (The Canal), and raise their kid there. One day when the husband, David, is archiving a film he finds out a murder happened in his home which is unsettling (a husband killed his wife)! David begins to believe his wife is cheating on him which she very much is, he catches her in the act and his first thought is to bludgeon the guy to death. David is able to avoid doing this but is plagued with some special visitors when he is next to The Canal. The next day his cheating wife doesn’t show up back home… Dun dun dun! “People always suspect the husband… because it’s always the husband. Every fucking time.”

They find her body in The Canal! It appears that her heel snapped and she fell in and drowned. David continues to learn more dark history about The Canal. A dark figure is also coming up a lot in his footage and in his life, David is rather haunted. He is so convinced that the bad man is coming for him that he sends his son away but then sees the dark figure over video chat! The nanny is scared and wants to leave but isn’t sure what to do. She gets attacked by an unknown force in the night and David locks her and the kid in the closet so she totally thinks David attacked her so she’s gone.

David attempts to capture the thing on film and even puts powder on his floors so that he will see the footprints left behind by whomever is in his home! The cops find a hammer with his fingerprints on it but his wife didn’t die via hammer so I don’t know that it’s fair that he’s in any trouble other than for littering. David follows the path that he found when he opened up the wall and he follows the tunnel behind his house that leads to The Canal.

He finds some creepy stuff there and his coworker tries to talk some sense into him but he just ends up feeding her to The Canal Creature. Oh, but suddenly David remembers it was him all along who killed his wife and coworker, woops! But The Canal demons made him do it and then they dragged him down with them into the depths. I guess the dad became one of the demons too because he encourages Billy to kill himself so that he can be with his parents again.

A native woman lays out in excruciating detail what the guerillas did to her and her people (to the children and women especially), it was a heartbreaking scene, honestly. It felt very real (because in some places it is real) so it was very sobering. After being found guilty of genocide the grandfather fakes a medical incident but then in the hospital can be seen smoking and getting poured a drink from a flask so clearly it isn’t that serious. You feel no sympathy for his character so you don’t care that he is being haunted or hunted or having all those protesters outside his door.

Nothing creepy starts happening until over 30 minutes in and even then it isn’t haunted behavior. (I guess the weeping at the top of the film was a bit suspicious but it was so quiet I needed to watch the scene again to pick up on it) You basically watch a slow paced political drama for a half hour and then the weird maid comes in and even then she isn’t that weird, just a little spooky. 45 minutes in and the creepiest thing we see is grandpa boner. One hour in and still no big scares, no big villain (other than the grandfather). I am BORED.

This is just a movie about one old man's terrible choices and how they are coming back to bite him in the ass slowly but surely. His wife has a nightmare where she is one of his victims, she just doesn’t know it yet. I feel very little sympathy for his family members except his granddaughter who is clearly innocent in all this, but the maid is protecting her like she couldn’t protect her own children, so I don’t feel like the granddaughter is under any threat.

The wrap up is basically this: asshole grandpa leads his people in Guerilla warfare and genocide and he thinks there will be no consequences. Turns out, the ghost of a woman whose kids he drowned has come back to haunt him and his family but mostly just him. She pranks him a bit before getting his own wife to murder him by letting her see the vision of what he had done to the natives. Very underwhelming, and I was actually anticipating some good creeps but just having a lady with long hair that’s wet standing around isn’t that scary. It was basically a sobering political documentary that I never intended to watch. I suppose with a title like “The Weeping Woman” I should have assumed there would be some sadness but good grief was this a somber ride. Grandpa War-machine deserved death and worse, our movie ends with the ghosts having moved on to the next in the pecking order for their revenge, they won’t be satiated until all the scumbags who murdered their children in cold blood are dead.