Venus is what happens when you take a grimy Madrid housing block, an H. P. Lovecraft story, and a bag of stolen drugs, then shake them together until something unholy and fluorescent falls out. It’s loud, sweaty, aggressively unpleasant in all the right ways—and it proudly refuses to act like a respectable “elevated horror” film. This thing wants to crawl under your skin, track mud across your nerves, and leave cigarette burns on your soul on the way out.
At the center of the chaos is Lucía, played by Ester Expósito in full “disaster final girl” mode. She’s a go-go dancer in a nightclub, and the film wastes no time showing you just how hostile her world is: leering men, predatory bosses, a job that feels like it’s eating her youth by the minute. Lucía’s not some wide-eyed innocent. She’s scrappy, angry, selfish at times, and thoroughly done with everyone’s nonsense. In other words, she feels like a real person who has seen some things and would very much like to stop seeing them.
Her brilliant escape plan from this life is… crime. Specifically, she steals a duffel bag full of pills from her charmingly homicidal employers. This instantly puts her on the kill list of people who absolutely do not have a conflict-resolution department. With the mob after her, Lucía does what any chaos magnet would do: she runs to the one place she thinks they won’t look—her estranged sister’s flat in a decaying apartment block at the outskirts of Madrid.
Her sister Rocío isn’t thrilled to see her, but she lets Lucía in for the sake of Alba, Rocío’s young daughter and the movie’s designated “person we really don’t want to see murdered by cultists.” The building itself, named Venus, is pure urban doom: flickering lights, peeling walls, neighbors who look like they’ve been living there since the Spanish Inquisition, and a subtle yet powerful “something terrible happened in this hallway” vibe. You know instantly this is not the kind of place where good things happen, unless your definition of “good” involves summoning nightmares.
From here, Venus pulls off its neatest trick: it layers two different kinds of horror on top of each other. On one level, Lucía is trapped in a very grounded thriller. The gangsters she stole from are hunting her. She’s hiding the drugs, lying to her sister, and trying not to get everyone killed. It’s grimy, low-life crime tension, the kind where every knock on the door sounds like a death sentence.
On another level, there’s the building itself: a kind of vertical witch house soaked in occult history and bad energy. Strange noises echo through the vents. Elderly neighbors behave just a little too oddly. Alba sees and hears things no child should, and for once it’s not just adult arguing. The walls feel alive, and not in a fun, hippie way. The Lovecraft influence is there, but instead of dusty New England mansions, we get social housing, faulty elevators, and stairwells that might actually be portals to somewhere much worse.
That’s one of the film’s strongest points: it drags cosmic horror out of the countryside and drops it into the kind of building you pass every day without a second thought. The “unknowable” in Venus isn’t a distant galaxy or a forbidden book; it’s something festering behind the neighbor’s door, underneath the floorboards, listening through the pipes. It’s the idea that hell isn’t in some abstract beyond—it’s in your block, and your rent is late.
Balagueró pushes the atmosphere hard. The cinematography leans into sticky neon, sickly greens, and deep shadows. The camera follows Lucía in tight, panicked movements down cramped corridors, through cluttered rooms, up and down stairwells that feel like Escher designed them after a nervous breakdown. The building itself becomes a labyrinth, and not the nice kind with a dance number at the end.
As things escalate, the film gleefully slides from crime thriller into full-on supernatural chaos. Without spoiling every insanity on the menu, Venus goes big on occult body horror: contorted limbs, unnatural growths, visions that feel like migraines manifesting in three dimensions. The violence is graphic and mean—bones break, flesh tears, and the line between “mobster brutality” and “witch-fueled abomination” starts to blur. If you’re squeamish, this movie will absolutely test your commitment to finishing it.
Through all of this, Ester Expósito keeps Venus from just becoming a parade of grotesqueries. Lucía is often selfish, sometimes reckless, and occasionally downright unlikeable—but she’s always compelling. You believe she’d steal from the wrong people. You believe she’d show up at her sister’s door without thinking the consequences through. And crucially, you believe her desperate, filthy determination to protect Alba once things start crawling out of the metaphorical and literal basement.
There’s a darkly funny undercurrent to her performance, too. Even when she’s drenched in blood and cosmic goo, there’s this constant “I did not sign up for this” energy about her. She spends half the movie looking like she just stepped out of a music video fight scene that got invaded by demons, and somehow that’s exactly the tone Venus needs.
The supporting cast adds their own flavors of menace and pathos. Rocío is not just “the responsible sister”; she’s bitter, tired, and done with Lucía’s mess, which makes her eventual involvement feel earned, not obligatory. Alba avoids being an annoying horror-movie child by actually having some personality, a mix of innocence and eerie awareness that the adults are very much lying about how “fine” everything is. The local thugs are satisfyingly awful, and the older neighbors might be the most unsettling of all, shuffling around with secret knowledge and the smugness of people who know you’re already part of the ritual whether you’ve RSVP’d or not.
Venus isn’t perfect. Sometimes the story stumbles over its own enthusiasm, cramming in one more set piece when a quieter beat might have hit harder. The lore stays intentionally fuzzy, which helps the atmosphere but might frustrate those who like their witchcraft explained with diagrams and flashbacks. And the tone, while mostly well-managed, occasionally veers so hard into over-the-top violence that you may find yourself laughing at moments that probably weren’t meant to be funny—but honestly, that might be part of the charm.
Because despite all its nastiness, Venus has a wicked sense of humor. Not in the “jokes and quips” way, but in the “look how absolutely cursed this situation is” way. There’s something almost gleeful about watching mobsters, who think they’re the biggest threat in the building, slowly realize they are way out of their depth. It’s cosmic justice: the predators become prey, trapped in a place that plays by rules none of them understand.
By the time the film reaches its final stretch, the apartment block is less a location and more a character having a full nervous breakdown. Walls bleed, doors fail, the sun might as well not exist. Lucía, Alba, and Rocío are caught in the middle of a collision between human greed and something implacable that doesn’t care about their plans or their trauma—it just wants what it wants. Whether they survive feels less like a question of fate and more like a challenge to see how stubborn they can be.
In the end, Venus stands out because it’s unapologetically itself. It doesn’t chase prestige, or tidy metaphors, or soft landings. It wants to make you feel trapped, gross, and weirdly exhilarated. It wants to put a cosmic horror story in a place that feels uncomfortably real and say, “Yeah, this is where the universe breaks: in a crappy apartment block with thin walls and terrible neighbors.”
If you prefer your horror clean and tasteful, this probably isn’t for you. But if you like your nightmares urban, sweaty, and soaked in equal parts blood and bad decisions, Venus is a gloriously unhinged ride—with one of the most delightfully chaotic heroines you’ll see trying to outrun both the mob and the abyss.
