Errementari

 I tend to be down on Netflix original movies, but that's a stance heavily coloured by their would-be blockbuster attempts - the shit they put out with Snyder or the Russo brothers, for example. But in their eternal hunger for ever more content, they've also done the world a favour giving money to, say, German or Spanish martial artists to fund their action epics, not to mention giving funding to people like Jeremy Saulnier and Pablo Larrain, or snatching interesting projects like Nimona from oblivion.

 This is a really roundabout way to say I really appreciate it when they use the some chump change (from the money they got by breaking movie business with their unsustainable practices) to help get stuff like Errementari made.

 The title sounds like the beginning of a racist joke, but it just means Blacksmith in Basque; It refers to a scattering of ancient European folk tales (according to some ethnographers, one of the oldest known) about a blacksmith who makes a deal with hell and ends up getting the better of old scratch.

 The blacksmith in question is Patxi (Kandido Uranga); A man so evil, so cruel, the animated prelude informs us, that the devil himself would learn to fear him. He spends a good part of the first act off-screen, an ogre-like hermit cooped up in his old smithy.

 The film instead follows some of the regulars of the local inn as they try and help a visiting government official (Ramón Agirre) in locating some gold the smith was said to have stolen during the first Carlist war - and also Usue (Uma Bracaglia), a little bullied girl who may have some relationship to the old man.

 The inn crowd runs afoul of Patxi soon enough, setting the residents of the small town in a collision course with him. Usue, meanwhile, steals away into the smithy, and ends up freeing the demon the Smith had imprisoned in an iron cage. Oops!

 The script (by director Paul Urkijo Alijo and Asier Guerricaechebarría) is all over the place, especially in the early going, but the shambolic structure helps give the film a strangely offbeat, authentic feel, and when things go to hell (figuratively at first, then literally) it's hard to predict where the story is going. But the focus remains on the characters and their destination is, thank goodness, hugely satisfying - I have a lot of time for a movie that manages to juggle sweetness and badassery.

 It never even attempts being scary, but that's ok - this is horror only by default, and it's better to think of it as dark fantasy or even a fairy tale. It certainly looks like one. Colours are tightly controlled - it looks a little fake in one or two shots, but most of the time it's beautiful; The movie owns its artificiality. Paul Urkijo Alijo and cinematographer Gorka Gómez Andreu also use non-standard framing to make things feel a little mythical; For example, I love a scene that tracks Usue as sneaks into a room, but she's in the background, out of focus - the camera stays on the smith's sleeping face throughout. It feels like a scene out of Jack and the Beanstalk. And as you'd expect out of a dark fairy tale, the film also takes some visual cues from Guillermo Del Toro.

 But things never get quite as dark as its closest touchstone, Pan's Labyrinth. There's quite a bit of humour threaded throughout: some of it home-baked (got to love those ubiquitous bear traps), some of it courtesy of a faithful display of the visual wit of medieval demonology (expect faces in inappropriate places). The themes are heavy, but not too much so, and while it's rooted in medieval Christianism there are more than a few welcome modern touches, such as the Sandman-like detail that human souls go to hell because they want to be punished.

The effects are excellent for the modest budget - a mixture of really great makeup with digital touch-ups for that signature Bosch/Bruegel look. The acting is mostly strong - there are a couple of iffy child actors, and it took me a while to warm up to Bracaglia's Usue, but I was fully on-board with her soon enough. What kept throwing me off, as a native Spanish speaker, is that the Basque language falls into a sort of uncanny valley where it really sounds like Spanish but I couldn't make out a single word. Pretty disconcerting, but obviously neither a major problem nor something I can blame on anyone but myself.

 Despite a slow start, this was a lovely treat - imaginative, unique, and affecting - an idiosyncratic take on a folk tale, tweaked for modern sensibilities but fairly faithful to the mostly medieval mindset that spawned it. Well... except for a certain sympathy for the devils, but that's a given in these degenerate, godless times.