THE DEVIL’S TEARDROP
- Sandro Mairata
- Mar 10
- 3 min read
RATING: 3.5/5 | By Sandro Mairata @smairata/ REFLEKTOR
“A horror film that tries to keep one foot in independent cinema and the other in B movies.”
Four young filmmakers travel to a remote area of the Peruvian jungle to document illegal mining and encounter a mythological Andean demon that puts their lives in danger. Using found footage and spoken in English, Spanish, and Quechua, The Devil’s Teardrop (La lágrima del diablo) unfolds using a tonal mix of horror and realism sustained by the first-person cameras used by the characters to record the danger that surrounds them.
Director Gonzalo Otero brings together a cast of actors with some experience but who are clearly not recognizable to the general public, and thus sets his story in motion. Javier Saavedra plays Horacio, the only Peruvian in the group, who is in charge of driving the van; Gabriel Rysdahl is Isaac, one of the American friends; Mia Rose Kavensky plays Jackie, who is in a relationship with Horacio; and Sydney Amanuel is Sarah, the filmmaker who spearheads the idea of shooting the documentary. It is impossible not to reference The Blair Witch Project (1999), a seminal film in the union of horror with found footage that created the template for later and much more successful titles such as Cloverfield, REC, and Paranormal Activity—all of which became franchises.
Otero makes the right choice in selecting the main location, the fictional village of Qullu, which has all the elements of emptiness and gloomy solitude necessary for his distressing intentions. Likewise, there is good continuity so as not to tire the viewer with the detail that the protagonists continue filming in a more than implausible way at all times, even in the most alarming moments, establishing a hierarchy of protagonists: first highlighting the volatile Horacio in contrast to the stubborn Sarah, and then the polar opposites of the hesitant Jackie and the fearful Isaac.
Part of the charm of The Devil’s Teardrop is that it makes us believe that the protagonists are really filming in a constant, professional, and linear manner; therein also lies the Achilles’ heel of relying on a conventional aesthetic versus the freshness of the anarchic that results from recording randomly with a camera. The excuse that we have four “documentary filmmakers” behind the good image quality is not enough. The lack of the unexpected, the erroneous, what goes wrong when recording something under the stress of feeling on the brink of death is noticeable.
The thing is, Otero wants to keep his film with one foot in the “independent” world and the other in B movies, managing a correct production that complies with industry standards (the film is intended for an international Anglophile audience). In that sense, the script for The Devil’s Teardrop becomes hopelessly basic to the eye trained in the horror or mystery genres: from at least the 15th minute onwards, we can already guess the general explanation with certainty—the clues are too obvious—and the motivation of the viewer becomes to confirm our suspicions. Otero complies with the norms—when it seems strange that there is no nudity or sex in a story about two couples in their twenties in the jungle, bang! There it is—and as time passes and we see the succession of events, we end up giving up on expecting any big revelations. Although there are a couple of interesting ones.
The sustained tension and sudden scares are justified in the dark and dense jungle setting. The actors rise to the challenge, with the greatest dramatic weight falling on Sydney Amanuel's shoulders as Sarah. Otero navigates the limits of his budget and cast with relative confidence, making it clear that he wants to move quickly to the core of his story, avoiding delving too deeply into Peruvian Andean mythology beyond a few quick strokes to understand the supposed presence of the supay (demon). More could have been done to explore the story from this angle and not leave the setting as little more than a backdrop. However, that was not the intention, but rather a simpler and more complex one: to scare.
Year of Release: | 2025 |
Director | Gonzalo Otero |
Producer | Daniel Silva Jasaui |
Cast | Sydney Amanuel Mia Rose Kavensky Hermelinda Luján Gabriel Rysdahl Javier Saavedra Diego Sakuray |
IMDB |
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