David Dastmalchian's Latest Supernatural Horror Is No 'Late Night with the Devil' -

Horror has a lot of subgenres, from slashers to monster movies and everything in between, and supernatural and possession films have been among the most popular for many decades. Classics like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist did it best, and more modern offerings like the Conjuring franchise have kept it going, but as good as the subgenre has been, it can also fall into some of the laziest tropes. If you’re a horror aficionado, a supernatural movie filled with moves you see coming because it’s been done many times before is frustrating. Sadly, such is the case with Rosario.

Written by Alan Trezza and directed by Felipe Vargas in his feature film debut, Rosario stars Emeraude Toubia as the titular character, with horror veteran David Dastmalchian (Late Night with the Devil) in a supporting role. It’s a film about family and tragedy, with a supernatural bent, all taking place in a rundown apartment building during a New York City blizzard. The practical effects are jaw-dropping, but sadly, the story is a dud.

What Is ‘Rosario’ About?

Rosario starts in 1999 with young Rosario Fuentes (Emilia Faucher) celebrating her birthday in her New York City apartment with her large Mexican family. Her father, Oscar (José Zúñiga), is in charge of everything as her mother, Elena (Diana Lein), is sick. Her grandmother, Griselda (Costanza Gutierrez), is acting bizarrely, staring intently at Rosario and mumbling, making her granddaughter very uncomfortable.

We then jump to 2025, where a grown-up Rosario (Toubia) is a successful stockbroker still living in New York. We see that she’s fit, rich, and has some power in life, the exact opposite of her family. One day, she receives a phone call from Marty (Paul Ben-Victor), the super of her grandmother’s apartment. He tells her the sad news that Griselda has passed away. Even though Rosario hasn’t seen her grandmother in years, she agrees to go sit with her body until the ambulance arrives to pick it up. There’s just one problem: a blizzard is coming, and it’s going to take a long while for help to get there. Oh, and there’s something very, very wrong with Grandma, even though she’s dead.

Griselda’s apartment is filthy and covered in bugs, and her strange next-door neighbor, Joe (Dastmalchian), won’t leave Rosario alone about getting his borrowed air fryer back. That’s nothing compared to the strange happenings that begin occurring in the apartment, and the discovery of the altar and cauldron hidden in another room. Griselda has been up to some very bad things, and as Rosario turns into a full-on supernatural possession film, our heroine must fight to make it through this snowy night.

‘Rosario’ Nails It With the Setting and Practical Effects

Rosario does have a lot going right for it. It’s a smaller, intimate film made up mostly of Rosario alone in an apartment with a dead body, similar to how The Autopsy of Jane Doe felt. The grungy surroundings of this dark and dirty apartment are a horror show unto themselves, where who knows what can be lurking. It felt a lot like the setting of Evil Dead Rise, with a rundown apartment building and only a few people in the hallways. Rosario is unsettling to look at. This is not only a place where our titular character doesn’t want to be, but we don’t want to either. Put a corpse on the couch on top of it, and it’s unbearable.

Lucky You, You Can Now Watch David Dastmalchian’s Raw and Realistic Screenwriting Debut for Free

Human hope vs. animalistic instinct.

When Rosario turns into a supernatural film, it gets a big thumbs up for its effects. From the simple makeup that makes Griselda’s actress look like a corpse, to the more shocking moments that give us demonic spirits and long, hairy hands reaching out from the dark and impossible places, the horror that Felipe Vargas shows on screen will give you the heebie-jeebies. The issue is that the surrounding story isn’t enough to hold it all up.

‘Rosario’s Weak Story Is a Mash-Up of Better Attempts

Rosario starts out interesting enough with the contrast of a well-off heroine coming back into the “life” of the poorer grandmother she abandoned. The small setting is effectively claustrophobic as well, but when the horror starts, Rosario becomes every other possession movie you’ve ever seen, with strange noises in the dark, gross looking, slow-moving creatures, long fingers reaching out, or visions of a dead family coming to Rosario, and our lead easily thinking this is the ghost of someone she cared about, while we can see from a mile away that it’s the evil spirit playing a trick on her. Even the third act twist is easily figured out.

Early on, when the supernatural events start happening to Rosario, putting her life in danger, she stays in the apartment when she should have run out immediately. Hmm, a worm just crawled in my arm somehow, and now a strange symbol is appearing on my palm. Golly, let’s hang around and see what happens next! Rosario does eventually run away, but the snowstorm outside is there to force her back. It’s then that the movie gets insulting, as Rosario does a Google search to discover that her grandmother has been conducting ceremonies that pertain to Rosario and deal with an ancient, evil religion. Man, you can really find anything on Google!

Her phone also allows her to find a way to beat the entity, because why not, and when her phone goes dead, she conveniently finds some books that have answers. It’s lazy storytelling made insufferable at times when Rosario speaks out loud in awkward dialogue so she can explain the plot to the audience instead of trusting us to be smart enough to figure it out. Even Rosario‘s score gets frustrating, as the same generic music plays over and over on a loop, trying not to create but keep an atmosphere, when quiet would work better in many scenes. Thankfully, Rosario doesn’t fall into the jump scare trap. There are no scenes of a dead grandma or evil spirits jumping out to a loud musical cue.

The most disappointing part of Rosario is that David Dastmalchian has almost nothing to do. He’s the creepy next-door neighbor who won’t stop knocking on the door, and because of the actor’s popularity, you assume he has a big role that’s going to be revealed later on. Prepare to be disappointed, because he’s given very little to chew on — a waste of a spectacular talent. Still, if you haven’t seen many demon possession movies, or on the opposite spectrum, if you can’t get enough of them, Rosario is a decent 90-minute watch. It’s not awful, it’s not going to insult you, but it’s a retread of better movies with every predictable plot point you can imagine.