Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil

If you like movies, we live in an age of wonders.  We can now see films that probably would have been wholly inaccessible even five years ago.  This is due, in part, to Netflix and its international outreach.  Netflix streams films into hundreds of international markets and, further, provides financing for content indigenous to those markets.  The result is that, almost nightly, we can watch TV series and genre films that might otherwise never be exported to the United States.  The world is a big place and there are many gifted directors working all around the globe in a variety of forms.  Netflix lets the viewer see this work and many of these films, modestly made for the entertainment of local audiences in places like Indonesia or Spain or Australia, are both exotic and very amusing -- the prestige pictures tour the international festival circuit and are usually released with fanfare; many of the Netflix films are small independently produced pictures, propped up with Netflix money, and some of these films are better than their more famous counterparts shown at Toronto or Cannes or Berlin. 

Errementari, the Blacksmith and the Devil is an example of very well-made, intricately crafted horror movie, shot for audiences in northern Spain and, therefore, made in the Basque language.  The picture is intriguing because it seems to arise from a literary fairy tale, apparently a story written in Basque, that embodies some exotic folk traditions.  The film is charming because of its strangeness.  Yet it is not so strange as to be estranging -- we can generally relate to the characters and their plight.  An opening title establishes the intensely local aspect of the film:  the story's prologue is set during the "First Carlist War."  I have no idea what the Carlist war was, nor did I know that there was more than one of them.  From the movie's images, I assume that the Carlist War took place in Basque country, possibly in the era of the American Civil War -- but I admit to not being certain about this.  In any event, the story concerns a blacksmith who may have traded his soul to the Devil in exchange for escaping a firing squad -- at the outset, prisoners are being shot down in a sequence that seems to derive from Goya's Disasters of War.  The blacksmith survives execution, comes back to his home village, where he finds that his wife has just given birth to a child that he could not possibly have fathered.  There's a big fight and the blacksmith kills the woman's paramour.  She, then, hangs herself and goes straight to Hell as a suicide -- at least, everyone believes this to be the case. The baby girl grows up as a kind of ward of the village, taunted by her playmates because of her mother's suicide.  The doughty blacksmith retreats to a ruined forge deep in the mountains, erecting all sorts of iron spikes, chains, and bear-traps to keep people from intruding on his solitude.  The little girl, Usue, sneaks into the blacksmith's ruinous and diabolical forge.  There she seems a small, strange-looking boy confined in an iron cage.  The walls and ceilings and the fences outside are all festooned with big, brutish-looking iron crosses -- although we don't know what this imagery means, it's there for a purpose.  The girl observes the blacksmith torturing the little boy, pities him, and agrees to let him out of the cage.  But the little boy is really a demon who is hiding in human form, a devil with horns and a flickering tail, a malicious creature named Sartael.  Sartael causes all sorts of havoc.  The townspeople form a lynch mob and carrying torches attack the smithy's sinister forge -- their ostensible purpose is to rescue the little girl, although, in fact, members of the mob are also looking for gold apparently hidden during the Carlist War.  The blacksmith is tortured to reveal the location of the gold.  The leader of the mob turns out to be the King of the Demons, a huge crocodile-headed monster named Alastor.  He's been sent from Hell to drag Sartael back into the inferno.  Usue, the little girl, and the blacksmith end up being cast into a lobby or sort of fiery waiting room next to the Hell-mouth belching flames.  A battle ensues between the Blacksmith and Alastor.  Like Orpheus, the Blacksmith has come to Hell not only to rescue the little girl but also to free his wife who has ended up in these nether regions because of her suicide.  The scenes in the ante-room to Hell are extremely impressive -- the demons are genuinely horrifying in their appearance and the long procession of white robed sinners seems impelled into the Inferno:  when it looks like the doors are closing, the damned scurry to cast themselves into the white-hot flames.  The film's narrative is cunning:  first, we are tutored to fear the Blacksmith as a kind of sinister monster, but he turns out to be the most heroic of heroes.  Sartael is a fearsome enough demon until we see his big brother Alastor, a monstrous being who looks like a an elegant Godzilla dressed in a tuxedo of acetylene-torch flames -- after Alastor appears, Sartael even becomes a good guy of sorts, the fierce little girl's sidekick.  Clearly, the material is rooted in Basque folklore and proverbs.  The demons can't abide the sound of a church bell ringing and they are afflicted by a weird counting mania, a strange defect but one that makes a certain obsessive-compulsive sense.  If you can throw chickpeas on the floor, the devils are wired to cease their pursuit, drop to their knees, and desperately start counting the peas -- this will usually give you enough time in which to escape.  At the end of the picture, Sartael, a handsome serpentine sort of devil, leaps up and shouts at the crowd (and film audience) "You yokels, while you sleep I'll bite off your thumbs" -- a fearsome threat but one that I've never heard before.  The film ends with an inspiring shot of the blacksmith Errementari using a huge bell forged of the Carlist gold as a battering ram to smash into Hell to retrieve his lost wife.  Then, the movie ends with a couplet of some kind:  words to the effect of "That was That / Take a pumpkin and go to the square" -- clearly some kind of fairytale tag used to end Basque tales of this sort.  This movie is no masterpiece but it is evocatively filmed -- the exteriors, including mossy ancient forests, are exquisite and the special effects are beautiful.  The principal demons have a well-groomed lizard-like appearance that is both appealing and horrible.  Like most fairy-tales, the story has a serious subtext about rage and revenge and the danger of acting impulsively.  The picture is also quite funny -- it's very amusing to see fearsome devils hysterically trying to count the peas flung on the cinders in the ante-chamber to Hell.  This kind of film certainly would not have been exported to any theaters in the US ten or fifteen years ago.  It's a minor film but one that is worth ninety minutes of your  time if you like supernatural thrillers of this kind.