Evil Eye (2022): What Really Happened to Nala and Her Family?
Plot summary, meaning explanation, similar films.
Genre: horror
Year of production: 2022
Directed by: Isaac Esban
Actors: Paola Miguel, Ofelia Medina, Ivanna Sofia Ferro, Samantha Castillo
The painting by Isaac Esban, imbued with the spirit of retro, is a strong example of national Mexican horror. This is not horror in its purest form – rather a hybrid of folk horror, mystical thriller and family drama.
According to many viewers, the meaning of the film Evil Eye (Mal de ojo) lies on the surface. In creepy-colorful form, this film invites everyone to ask themselves: are you sure you know yourself?
What is the movie about
Brief description of the content of the film Evil Eye. A married couple, William and Rebecca, bring their two daughters, teenager Nala and baby Luna, to the village to visit their grandmother. The youngest girl is seriously ill. Doctors cannot give her an accurate diagnosis and all the hope of desperate and tired parents is for alternative medicine.
Ivanna Sofia Ferro as Luna and Paola Miguel as Nala. Frame from the film.
Rebecca has not spoken to her mother for many years, and the children see their grandmother Josefa for the first time. The elderly woman lives with the maid, Abigail and other servants. Nala doesn’t like her grandmother very much. She doesn’t like anything at all and she didn’t want to go anywhere – not least because of the difficult relationship with her mother, whom she is painfully jealous of her younger sister.
The gloomy and old mansion in which Josefa lives is frightening and alarming. There is no Internet in it, and ordinary cellular communication barely breaks through, so Nala has to forget about Tik-Tok and other favorite social networks. The swimming pool that was promised to her as a solace is unusable – dirty and no less gloomy than the house, it was last cleaned more than half a century ago. Both he and the house are a match for Josefa herself, who does not show cordiality and behaves with Nala more than harshly. In response to her grandmother’s tyranny and prohibitions, the girl begins to rebel.
However, soon enough she becomes close to Abigail. She tells her sisters a Caribbean legend about a terrible blood-drinking witch, a lugar, and about triplets. During the day, she was no different from other people, but at night she shed human skin from herself, hid it in a hollowed-out pumpkin, and flew off to drink children’s blood. She needed the monster not only to prolong life, but also to preserve the desired youth.
For several years, the witch drank the blood of one of the triplets. No one noticed anything (the bloodsucker left no traces), but in the end the girl became seriously ill.
To help their sister, the other two girls went to a remote hut located on the very shores of the Caribbean Sea. There lived a sorceress who offered them a deal – she would teach them how to make Baka (folklore creatures that can fulfill any desire, but bring evil in return) and this will save the life of a sick triplets. In return, the sisters will have to ask Buck for wealth and give it to her. In fact, the sorceress invited them to perform a ritual condemned by society and the church.
Ofelia Medina played the role of Josefa’s grandmother. Frame from the film.
Whatever the case, the girls created Buck and their sister got better. They fulfilled their end of the bargain and gave the treasure to the sorceress. However, the beautiful young witch already had power over them and easily persuaded them to serve her. One of the sisters really liked the idea of becoming a witch, but the other decided to stay away from it.
Once a girl who studied dark magic realized that her mentor was the same witch who sucked blood from her sister. She decided to take revenge on Lugar and persuaded the second triplets to kill her. This could only be done by finding and salting her human skin. Dying, the witch tore out her own eye, threw it at her sisters and put a curse on them, saying that they would suffer from a blood relative …
After that, Nala begins to have nightmares in which Josef’s grandmother appears as a witch. There are no parents and no, the Moon is weakening day by day and the further, the more the girl is convinced that something is really wrong with her grandmother.
One day, the girl, left by the will of the imperious Josefa without contact with her parents, decides to escape. Suddenly, Luna becomes ill on the road, and Josefa, who tracked down the girls, returns the sisters home.
Toward the end of the picture, Nala finally becomes convinced that her grandmother is a witch, and everyone else, including Abigail, also resorts to dark magic. Josefa takes full care of Luna and does not let Nala near her. The baby is weakening, but the grandmother, who at the beginning of the picture barely moved her legs, turns from a divine dandelion into a stately, strong woman …
One late evening, Nala still manages to contact her mother. “Mom, grandma is a witch!” she blurts into the phone. They do not have time to finish – Josefa breaks the telephone wire. Tension, growing all the time, results in a brawl. Nala wounds the old woman with scissors, grabs her sister in her arms and tries to run again. The girls run through the forest and suddenly hear loud music. Carrying Luna with her, Nala goes to the sound of drums and becomes a witness to the voodoo ritual. Among the participants in the ritual is the girls’ mother, Rebecca. Everything was started by her in order to create Buck …
The girls spend the night in the forest. The next morning, their parents discover them and take them back to their grandmother. At the house, Nala discovers a stack of old photographs. Looking at them, one after another, the girl is horrified: she sees three triplets: in childhood, in adolescence, youth and maturity. Two of them are well known to her – these are Josefa and her mother, Rebecca …
Evil Eye ending explanation
Explanation of the ending of Evil Eye. Nale comes to mind the end of the story told to her by Abigail. When it became known in the village that the triplets had turned to witchcraft, they disappeared and were never seen again. The sick sister grew old and died. The girl, who decided not to practice witchcraft anymore, also began to age. The third escaped and remained forever young, sucking the blood of children every night. Having compared all the facts, the girl realizes that the third sister is her mother.
At the very end, William and Rebecca are about to leave. Mother meets Nala on the stairs and demands to hurry. Rebecca gets into the car and Nala goes to her aunt-grandmother with the intent to kill her. Finding human skin, the girl salts it.
Frame from the film.
Upon returning home, her parents take Luna to the doctor, who, having examined her, reports that she is healthy. Nala is feeling worse and worse. One night she gets her first period. After sending things to the laundry, the girl hears a strange sound. In one of the rooms of the house, she sees a miniature voodoo altar and Buck. There she finds an open chest with human skin. A monster sits on the ceiling – a lugar. The witch bites her, and then unexpectedly hugs her and calls her granddaughter.
The meaning of the ending of The Witch: Reincarnation is that instead of her aunt-grandmother, Nala killed her mother, and Josefa took her place. Moreover, now Nala will also become a witch. That was the price Baka demanded in exchange for saving Luna. So the curse of the witch was fulfilled – the two sisters who killed her received their punishment, and the bloody tradition was passed on to a new generation.
The meaning of the film Evil Eye
The film’s slogan, translated from Spanish, is: “Evil never looks away.” These inconsistencies mislead the viewer, because there was no reincarnation in the film.
The “evil eye” is the evil eye, curse, corruption. The witch “spoiled” Josefa and Rebecca: dying, she tore out her own eye and threw it at the girls with a curse. Understanding the sisters well by this time, she knew perfectly well what she was doing.
Josefa is a sister who refused to practice black magic. The mother of Nala and Luna, Rebecca is a triplet who decides to become a witch. She continued to drink children’s blood to prolong her own youth. Rebecca became a witch because she had been practicing witchcraft since childhood, and Josepha because, wanting to become as young as her sister, she drank blood from the moon.
Frame from the film.
The terrible meaning of all this lies in the fact that Nala is waiting for the same thing, because she is a hereditary witch. According to the curse, the dark force will awaken in her against the background of a change in the hormonal background – that is, with the advent of menstruation. The finale of the picture hints that this is exactly what happened.
Why did Josefa suck the blood of the sick little Luna and not the older and healthier Nala? The answer is simple: to maintain life, the witch must feed on the blood of ordinary children. Witches feel each other. In Nala, Josefa saw not a victim, but a successor.
But why did everything end up the way it did and not the other way? There is no direct explanation in the picture, but the audience offers the following interpretation: the tragic events were provoked by the jealousy and envy of the lonely and old Josefa. She envied Rebecca because she managed to keep her youth, get married and have children. In the head of the old woman, remembering the curse of the witch, a plan has matured. The only blood relative capable of a fatal blow was Nala. So, you need to prepare her for this, nurture hatred in her.
In simple words, everything looked like this. The moon was sick so that Rebecca would return to the village to create Buck. For Luna Buck demanded her death. Because of Josefa’s jealousy, this was done by the hands of Nala…
Given the fact that Evil Eye is primarily a scary tale, then the meaning of the picture lies on the surface. If evil has sent trouble, then it will not be possible to defeat it with dark forces. Because if you resort to their help, then you yourself become part of evil …
Frame from the film.
However, the film also has a hidden meaning. In terms of theme and mood, Evil Eye is close to the classic Mexican horror “Poison for the Fairies” by Carlos Enrique Taboada. However, if Taboada’s picture was more of a metaphor, a parable about the power of children’s imagination, then Esban’s film is more simple and straightforward.
It quickly becomes clear to a sensitive viewer that the legend of the blood-sucking witch is just a background. The main idea of the picture is to show the adult world through the eyes of a child.
The core of the plot is Nala’s relationship with her mother and grandmother. The viewer sees a typical conflict: the mother, who is fully occupied with the youngest child, imposes care on the elder. At the same time, Rebecca seems to forget that her eldest daughter herself is still a child, who, moreover, is in a difficult transitional age. Grandmother involuntarily broadcasts her envy to her granddaughter. The girl cannot find support from anyone and, finding herself face to face with difficulties, is forced to cope with them on her own. She has to learn the first bitter lesson: even with the closest people, you can’t always feel safe, and you need to rely only on yourself.
In ancient folk tales, the protagonist, who takes part in dangerous adventures, undergoes initiation. In their analysis of the picture, the audience notes that the same thing happens to Nala – after passing the tests, she becomes different, an adult. It turns out that the essence of the film lies in the allegorical depiction of puberty – with jealousy for the mother and for all women in general.
Frame from the film.
Similar films
Here are a few films that are similar in meaning to the film Evil Eye:
- “Grandma” (Spain, France, Belgium, 2021). Susanna starts a successful career in the modeling business. The news that her grandmother had a stroke forces her to return home. There she will experience strange and frightening events.
- Witch’s Curse (UK, 2020). England, 17th century, the time of the plague and the persecution of people accused of witchcraft. After burying her husband and mother, young Grace rejects the advances of a local squire. For this, he accuses the girl of witchcraft.
- “Witches” (Austria, Germany, 2017). Mother and daughter live in a secluded place. The locals are afraid of them and call them witches. One day the woman becomes seriously ill.
