The Children Who Never Cried
Some horror films are about pain. Painless is about the terrifying absence of it. Juan Carlos Medina’s debut feature doesn’t just flirt with darkness—it takes it home, lights a candle, and makes love to it under the shadow of a crumbling monastery. It’s a Spanish-French-Portuguese fever dream about trauma, fascism, and the body’s betrayal—a film that asks, “What happens to humanity when the body stops screaming?”
And the answer, apparently, is: things get really weird.
Welcome to the Hospital of Lost Souls
The film opens in the early 1930s, during the Spanish Civil War—a time when compassion was rationed and science had delusions of grandeur. In a monastery-turned-laboratory (because nothing says “ethical research” like blood on the crucifix), Dr. Holzmann is trying to cure a group of children who can’t feel pain. These kids are medical anomalies and moral Rorschach tests: small, pale beings who don’t flinch when burned, cut, or stabbed.
Dr. Holzmann wants to help them. His colleague, Dr. Carcedo, wants to lock them away forever. One hopes for a cure; the other wants a cage. It’s the classic conflict of science versus control—if by “science” you mean electroshock therapy, and by “control” you mean fascism in a lab coat.
Among the children is Benigno, an unnervingly clever boy with eyes that say, “I’ve already seen hell, and it’s poorly lit.” He’s both innocent and monstrous—kind of like if Damien from The Omen had a conscience and a shovel. His friendship with a girl in the next cell gives the story its faint heartbeat of hope, as he spends years digging toward her with a spoon like a tender, psychotic mole.
It’s bleak, it’s beautiful, and it’s exactly the kind of nightmare that could only come from a country still haunted by its own history.
Modern Medicine, Ancient Wounds
Meanwhile, in the present day, we meet David (Àlex Brendemühl), who wakes from a car crash to learn that his wife is dead, his newborn child is barely alive, and his own body is turning against him. To make matters worse, a DNA test reveals he’s adopted. Most people would cry. David just looks like he wants to punch a god he doesn’t believe in.
His search for his biological parents turns into a twisted genealogy tour of Spain’s past—one that leads back to the same monastery, now a ruin of memories and bad decisions. Along the way, David discovers that his father was none other than Benigno, now renamed Berkano—a name that sounds less like a person and more like a prescription drug with horrifying side effects.
Tómas Lemarquis (whose face is a gift to the genre of “creepy bald men with tragic eyes”) plays Berkano as a sort of immortal wound. He’s ageless, hairless, and horrifyingly calm—like Nosferatu if he’d traded blood for guilt. He doesn’t feel pain, but his existence is agony. When father and son finally meet, it’s not a fight; it’s an autopsy of inherited trauma.
Fire and Flesh
The finale is pure gothic poetry. A cavern filled with candles. A preserved corpse of the mother. A son looking into the abyss of his family’s sins. And Berkano, the unkillable father, setting himself on fire while holding the woman he lost decades ago. It’s a literal family reunion in hellfire—a scene so haunting and lyrical it could make Guillermo del Toro put down his sketchbook in admiration.
There’s dark humor in it too, if you squint. These people spent their lives running from pain—only to end up burning alive in one big symbolic inferno. That’s irony you can roast marshmallows over.
Beauty and Brutality
Juan Carlos Medina directs with surgical precision and painterly obsession. Every frame looks like it could hang in a haunted museum—sepia-toned, smoke-stained, and morally confused. The cinematography by Alejandro Martínez is a visual anesthetic: soft, dreamlike, and punctuated by flashes of grotesque violence.
This is not horror that startles; it lingers. The camera moves slowly, like a surgeon inspecting a wound. You don’t watch Painless so much as absorb it, until it seeps into your bloodstream and makes you question whether empathy is a luxury or a curse.
The score, composed by Johan Söderqvist (of Let the Right One In fame), is melancholy perfection—a symphony for the damned. Strings weep while children don’t, and the music becomes the pain the characters cannot feel. It’s morbidly elegant, like Bach performed at a funeral where everyone’s already been embalmed.
The Horror of Humanity
What makes Painless special isn’t its gore or monsters—it’s that the true horror is empathy. Medina isn’t making a monster movie; he’s making an autopsy of civilization. The children who feel nothing are metaphors for a society that normalized cruelty. When you stop feeling pain, you stop recognizing it in others—and that’s how wars happen, prisons fill, and science becomes a scalpel for ideology.
The movie’s dual timelines—the fascist past and the disillusioned present—mirror each other like two halves of the same broken mirror. David’s lymphoma is the literal manifestation of his inherited disease: the cancer of unacknowledged history. The sins of the fathers, wrapped in gauze and government paperwork.
And yet, for all its bleakness, the film has an undercurrent of compassion. It doesn’t wag its finger at humanity’s cruelty; it simply shows it as inevitable, tragic, and occasionally absurd.
Performances That Bleed Without Bleeding
Àlex Brendemühl anchors the modern storyline with quiet despair. His David is a man haunted not by ghosts, but by biology. Every revelation strips him further down until he’s just a soul wrapped in medical tape.
Tómas Lemarquis, however, is transcendent. His Berkano is both terrifying and pitiful—a man cursed with indifference. He’s like Frankenstein’s monster if the monster had tenure in an asylum. His face barely moves, but his eyes are volcanoes.
The supporting cast—Derek de Lint’s idealistic doctor, Ramon Fontserè’s authoritarian scientist—add texture to the moral debate. Nobody here is truly evil; they’re just numb, which might be worse.
Pain as the Price of Humanity
There’s a delicious irony at the core of Painless. The characters spend their lives trying to eradicate suffering—only to discover that pain is what keeps us human. Without it, there’s no compassion, no learning, no love. Pain is the body’s memory of survival, and in trying to escape it, they erase themselves.
It’s like the film is whispering, “Yes, life hurts—but wait until you see what apathy looks like.”
The ending—father, son, and mother united in flames—isn’t just tragedy. It’s release. They finally feel something, even if it’s fire. And in that final moment, Medina achieves something few horror films manage: catharsis through combustion.
Final Thoughts: The Beauty of the Burn
Painless is a horror film for philosophers, a fable for masochists, and a warning to anyone who ever said, “I wish I couldn’t feel pain.” It’s stylish, intelligent, and unflinchingly grim—but it never wallows. It’s too busy dissecting history, morality, and the fragile absurdity of being human.
Medina may be making his directorial debut here, but he directs like a man who’s been carrying this story in his bones for decades. And with Painless, he gives us a masterpiece that doesn’t scream—it whispers while the world burns.
Final Judgment: ★★★★★ — A stunning, sorrowful symphony of numbness and flame. For anyone who’s ever wished to stop feeling pain, consider this your warning: feeling nothing might just be the worst agony of all.
