Vieja Loca (Crazy Old Lady) Review: Fantastic Fest 2025

"The women were like you, like me. Alone, without sisters."

Sometimes the scariest horrors aren’t monsters or masked killers, but memory itself. Vieja Loca, directed by Martín Mauregui, takes what could have been a straightforward psychological thriller and grounds it in Argentinian history, trauma, and the fragility of the mind.

Alicia (Carmen Maura) is an aging woman slipping into an episode of Alzheimer’s. Her daughter Laura (Agustina Liendo) is driving home when she begins receiving a string of unsettling phone calls. Alicia repeats the same question about a recipe, but soon reveals that her nurse is gone and disturbingly, Alicia answers when Laura tries calling the nurse herself. With no one else nearby, Laura asks her ex-boyfriend Pedro (Daniel Hendler) to check in. What follows is a harrowing ordeal where Pedro becomes trapped in Alicia’s delusion, mistaken for César, the man who once abused her, and forced to endure her spiraling rage.

The horror here is not cheap thrills. It is rooted in Argentina’s dark history of women disappeared during the war, their voices silenced but never forgotten. Alicia becomes a vessel for that grief, her fractured mind exposing trauma that refuses to stay buried. Carmen Maura is exquisite in the role, balancing frailty with ferocity, and Hendler delivers an equally compelling performance as a man shackled, physically and emotionally for much of the runtime.

Visually, the film is a contradiction: the home feels lived-in and warm, yet the cinematography and sound design twist it into something suffocating and eerie. Every creak of the floorboards, every silence between Alicia’s fragmented stories, makes you feel the weight of both personal and collective memory.

What makes Vieja Loca stand out is that it doesn't separate horror from history. The violence Alicia enacts isn’t random, it’s a manifestation of wounds carried by so many women whose stories were erased. The film becomes a chilling reminder that the past is never truly gone, especially when it is stitched into the fabric of an entire nation. By tying Alicia’s fractured memory to Argentina’s collective trauma, Mauregui elevates the film beyond what's expected into something far more haunting and real.

Vieja Loca is unsettling and deeply human. It isn’t just about an old woman’s episode. It’s about how trauma lingers, passed down through generations.

Trigger Warning: the film includes a dog death and a scene of sexual assault.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5