Premise: A Spanish teen accidentally summons a dark force when trying to communicate with her dead father.
I love the "based on actual events" corner of the horror genre. Unless you are talking about a serial killer, these actual events are always pretty tame or unverified. The stories are something like, "this guy started getting erratic when he moved into a new house" or "this murder scene looked a little weird". To make it into a horror movie, filmmakers have to go to extremes to give it a story. Veronica is one of those movies. The actual story does involve a seance with a Ouija board before a girl died. What exactly happened is unclear. That's where the horror movie screenplay takes over. The actual story is thin enough that I wonder if having "based on actual events" at the beginning is worth the other restraints required.
Overall, Veronica is good by-the-numbers horror. It's full of Ouija boards and pseudo-religious imagery. I haven't seen a lot of Spanish horror, but I get the sense that they really have a grasp of the basics of horror filmmaking. The movie uses darkness well. They understand that young children being a little annoying in a horror movie is enough to be unsettling. The movie doesn't try to overexplain events and when it gets to the climactic events, it's sufficiently scary. Veronica doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it's a perfectly good wheel. The only thing that "works against" it is that it's subtitled, so you can't split attention while watching it. (Not that I'd watch movies like that)
Verdict: Weakly Recommend
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