Everyone Will Burn (original title Y todos arderán) was directed and co-written by David Hebrero, the film goes along like an inverse The Omen. Instead of an unsuspecting protagonist discovering their child is in fact the antichrist, this reverses things by having the main lead knowing exactly what they have gotten into, and happy to go along with things. It leads to a kooky horror that has a strong vein of black humour running through it.
The film begins with María José (Macarena Gómez) just about to kill herself. Her plan is interrupted however by the arrival of a teenage little person (Sofiá García) who María initially mistakes for a young girl. She intends to take the girl to the local police station, figuring she is lost, but on the way she is stopped by police, with events leading to the girl psychically causing the two officers to die. Realising that the teenager is tied to an ancient prophecy that heralds the end of the world, Maria, with hatred in her heart for the local villagers who she holds responsible for the death of her child in the past, decides to look after the child she names Lucía, happy to help to bring about the end of the world.
I liked how Everyone Will Burn conceals the fact that it is an indie horror, and it does this by having a lot of what happens occur in the background or off-screen entirely. Events take place in a world where strange plagues and disasters are occurring throughout. All of this however is only mentioned over news reports, with characters never really directly confirming this. There is a large body count here, but many of the deaths occur while the focus is on scenes were that is not happening. It all ties into a starting set of story cards that speak of an incident in the town in 1980 that nearly brought about the end of the world, but which was stopped. Taking place some forty years later, many of the characters are people who lived through that earlier event and have been shaped by it. It made a change to have a chunk of the cast readily accepting that evil is occuring, as well as to have the 'heroes' portrayed as the bad guys, and the heroine definitely being an anti-hero.
Gómez was great in the lead role as the unbalanced María, an eccentric character with a short fuse. Her personality is over the top, yet it never quite goes far enough that it felt she was trying too hard to be weird and crazy. There was a slight Tim Burton vibe to the film, with scenes often verging on the self indulgent side, but only occasionally feeling like the filmmakers were trying too hard to create a weirdness. Maria has reasons why she would be fine with helping evil, not least that she was ready to kill herself at the opening of the movie, so made sense why she wouldn't care about burning the world down. García had more of a subdued role, her character with psychic powers is the one behind many of the kill scenes. It led to some visually appealing death sequences, the two officers at the start of the movie for sure, also a nice scene in which she drowns a teenager in a toilet, and one played for comedic effect in which she fatally contorts the body of a would be attacker. Germán Torres was great as Padre Abelino, a character who would be a hero in a typical horror, but his corruption and sins he has committed combining to make for a very flawed character. Special effects in general all looked decent, and I thought the film's score was perfectly chosen.
While María was a somewhat sympathetic character, her anger made her someone that wasn't the easiest to like. I did find myself more wishing that she would come out on top, but to be fair there were not really any character here that was really likeable. In general the subtitles were fine, though the opening prologue text wasn't translated in the best way, which led to a bit of a sour first impression. Still, a demonic child horror that uses the villains as the focal point of the story made for a film that was sometimes fun, and Everyone Will Burn which didn't get dull over its near two hour run time.
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