The Pact

Monica sees how, suddenly, Clara, her daughter, enters a deep and inexplicable coma. When the doctors give her up for dead, a stranger proposes a pact: he will save Clara but, in return, Monica must give him a life. Monica accepts and, against all odds, her daughter is saved. Now she must give him another life in return.

Production data:

FOTOGRAMAS
“Honestly, El pacto is not a horror movie regardless of employing some of the genre’s tools to tell the story. It is a psychological thriller that includes the supernatural element, on occasions in a somewhat sensationalist way, and actually it attempts to be a moral fable about the limits of human nature and the essence of evil.
David Victori helms an impeccable feature, very elegant, with a suggestive atmosphere. He knows how to plan each scene to create anxiety but El pacto loses out due to its formulaic nature and the repetition of schemes put in place by directors such as Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza when they started their careers”.

GUIA DEL OCIO
«There are so many takes on the eternal theme of selling your soul to the devil to achieve the impossible -at the end of the day it is a mere trick you pull yourself to avoid the natural consequences of things- the first film of David Victori is not uninteresting, especially during the first few minutes. But then it is incapable of developing the rest of the narrative in a way that flows and goes nowhere, despite the sensationalist photography and sound effects with try to conceal this fact.”

LA VANGUARDIA
“El Pacto is a film with an excellent atmosphere and robust mise-en-scène in which we lose interest as time goes on (the first forty-five minutes are much better than the rest), firmly upheld by the performances of Rueda, an outstanding Grandinetti and without an accent, and the breakout performance of Mireia Oriol, who plays the daughter and who has a bright future ahead”.
“The first minutes are unnerving and perturbing.”

EL PAÍS
“El pacto, David Victori’s first film is a horror movie that talks about the Devil, or rather, about pacts with the Evil one in painful situations. […] Albino spiders and an hourglass suggest effective images that sidestep the typical inverted cross and satanic rhetoric, but beyond the functionality of the plot (which finishes off by avoiding the ethical implications of an ending that is more conciliatory than consistent), the film suffers from the deafening silence of… the Devil.”
“Here it isn’t the devil speaking, it’s the market. And that is not a bad thing: the problem is that there really isn’t anything that perturbing or potentially diabolic.”

EL PERIODICO DE CATALUNYA
“El pacto is an interesting psychological thriller that swings between reason and paranoia and which deals with the consequences of our acts, a film that treads on uncomfortable waters to confront the audience with ongoing ethical dilemmas.
Its greatest weakness? That some of its narrative solutions are too formulaic, that certain situations seem somewhat mechanical and not very believable (such as Belén Rueda’s wig) and a few lines that seem a bit forced.”

E-CARTELERA
“It is easy to see that the film has been made with love and devotion. You can see it in the careful photography and production values, which provide visually interesting work, replete with details and very well executed action scenes that confirm that the director is beyond competent. The problem is that the scrip is not up to par with the circumstances and all of these elements end up diluted in the conventional story and abundant narrative holes.”