Yesterday I went to the premiere of the movie Nefarious. I admit that I was a little skeptical. I don’t like scary movies at all. Not even the suspense ones. I’m scared, and I prefer other types of cinema.
Nefarious wasn’t calling me at all. A priori, as young people say, I didn’t see that seeing it would be interesting to me.
But then, I started receiving comments everywhere: your friend who wants to see it because they recommended it to her. Your coworker who saw it in English and loved it and is waiting for its premiere to go see it; even going through a call from the distributor to invite you to the preview. Well, I, situated in my prejudice, with my thought of “this movie is not for me.”
I am stubborn, but over the years I have learned to open my eyes and my ears, at least I make an effort at it, and yesterday, due to one of those diosidences that occur in our lives, I went to see it.
What did I find? Firstly, a full cinema. Something amazing to see when it comes to a film of this type of cinema with values, which has to deal with so many problems when it comes to finding rooms for screenings.
Secondly, many familiar faces. People who I had not seen for a long time and who, like me, some went with a certain suspicion or fear because we do not really like the topic of the “bad guy.”
But what I want to share here is what I really found. And it is a movie that is not at all scary but rather thought-provoking. A story that is not terrifying, but very real, like life itself. A story that takes place in a prison and basically with only two characters who say many things through their dialogues.
I would highlight many, but since I want you to go see it, I will only share a small personal reflection with you.
Are you wondering, like me, what is happening in our world? Because, given the political and social panorama we have, I can’t stop thinking about how we got to this and how it is happening right under my nose.
Well, perhaps the first answer we can give to this is something that is palpable in the film: the devil’s greatest trick has been trying to convince the world that he does not exist.
Yes, in this very “flower power” conception of life, the theme of evil and its commander did not fit well, and we have stopped keeping it in mind for a long time, but it was there and, clearly, it is.
It is masked in this materialistic, hedonistic, transhumanist, individualistic society…. And all the “-ists” you want to add. And, what’s more, with less and less dissimulation.
When man forgets that there is a human nature and a good and an evil engraved in his heart that do not depend on the subjectivity of each one, what is happening: that we live in everything goes as long as I feel happy. (Which is not the same as being one).
A society based on how I feel at every moment is a liquid society, without foundations, where evil runs rampant.
This cocktail of living from what I feel or feel like at every moment, looking only towards my own navel, with the lack of transcendence and meaning, is what I find many times in my dialogues with young people at the university.
“I, in my freedom, am free when I can decide in every moment to do what I feel gives me joy and pleasure. Isn’t that what being free is? Doing whatever I want?” Many people tell me.
I don’t judge them. I myself once belonged to that group, to that mass I would say, that moves by impulses, by trends, by fashions… without a long-term project where the deep desires of my heart were projected. Likewise, I didn’t even know I had those desires. They were buried. Buried deep within me, covered by a pile of layers of cement and stones that suffocated them.
But there they were and there they are. In each one of us because we are well-made. The person is well-made, and we are the dream, the creation of the best construction manager: God, our creator, who does everything well.
This reality opens us or should open us to the hope that things, yes, are bad, not as we would like, but there is a solution, and it passes through each of us.
The solution is us, and we have the ability and FREEDOM to get to work on reversing it.
If you are wondering where to start, I would tell you to stop being a “sophist” – said of the person who loves his sofa – and start on the path to being an “andofist” – said of the person who likes to walk. Yes, get up from the couch, from the screen of your cell phone or television that positions you as a mere spectator, to grab your walking stick, and go for a walk.
Go out into the world, to your square meter of reality, to change it. Go to the cinema to see Nefarious and the upcoming films released by production companies like Goya, Gospa Arts, Bosco Films, European Dreams Factory… (I’m sure there are many more) that are committed to these stories.
Culture is something essential, because it is what we breathe and right now what it radiates is death (abortion, euthanasia…), denial that there is a human nature (gender ideology) of the beauty of motherhood, hypersexualization (innocence is killed of children, and they are made to experience things that are not appropriate for their age), lack of freedom of all kinds, religious, of expression… and it does it because we have let it do it.
It is essential that we all do our bit so that culture radiates and distributes through the air we breathe an oxygen that shows the grandeur of all human life and its dignity, the beauty of the family and the need for its care, the protection of childhood and its innocence, an education that forms good people, with ethics and morals…. And all this involves filling the movie theaters when one of these films is released and fighting against piracy. It means going to a conference, even if it is difficult for us to leave the house. By buying a certain book and dedicating time to training, and very importantly, we go through homes where our children watch some cartoons and not others.
And since we’re talking about children, it means dedicating time to them. For worrying about more things than your academic record. For educating them, knowing that education is more than just grades. It’s giving them hope. It is to show them that life has a meaning and a purpose.
