Upiro world première at Fantastic Fest, 18th Sept 2026
Óscar Martín’s Upiro is up front in revealing – or at least seeming to reveal – the kind of film that it intends to be. For that title is the Hispanicised form of the Old Slavic word upyr from which ‘vampire’ derives – and the film opens with a quote about upyr from Antoine Augustin Calamet’s early eighteenth-century two-volume Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants of Gungary, Moravia etc., and with an assertion that the film is “based on the first case of vampirism recorded by the Catholic Church in Spain.” So from the very outset, the generic direction – a period vampire picture – appears clearly marked. That said, this is a film that repeatedly wrongfoots the viewer, and at various points during its course you may find yourself wondering how its hermetically cloistered events could possibly become part of an official church record as proof of vampirism, or indeed whether this is even a vampire film at all – and any inference that you momentarily reach, you may well find yourself soon radically reassessing. Here answers are hidden in plain sight before the viewer is even sure what the question is.
It begins at night in a convent’s bedroom, where the bare foot of a sleeping woman (Tania Santana) is drained of blood first by a mosquito, and then by a shadowy figure whose point-of-view we see entering the room and focusing fetishistically on the woman’s lower leg – and it is hard to determine whether the audible gasping sigh with which the supine woman responds is expressing pain, pleasure or both. It is 1755 in Spain, and young noblewoman Ana (Pauline Brisy) is left by her father the Count (Manuel de Morales), very much against her will, at the door of a remote convent. Handing over a bag of money to ensure her easy transition into the life of the Order, Ana enters this strange closed world. There she is greeted by the stern Mother Superior (Teresa del Olmo), is shown to her sparse cell by the silent Sister Angustias (Enrique Martínez), and quickly befriends studious sister Remedios (Victoria Cerrada) who, unlike the other novices, comes from poverty and is there of her own volition to avoid the marriage and maternity that are her only other life options.
Bookish, virginal Remedios quietly rebels by secretly distributing to the other novices copies of Teresa of Ávila’s proto-feminist spiritual autobiography The Life of Teresa of Ávila that she has concealed inside bound texts of the authorised Bible – and she is also hiding Sapphic feelings from herself as much as others. Ana is more open in her defiance, refusing to say ‘amen’ when taking the sacrament from Father Rubis (Diego Anido), vigorously masturbating in her bedroom at night and even stealing, dispensing and herself drinking too much of the convent’s communion wine – and when she is punished with whippings from Mother Superior and Rubis, she laughs and challenges them to ‘spank’ her more and ‘harder’. The image of her seductively licking her own finger offers a visual quote from Walerian Borowczyk’s Behind Convent Walls (1978), and points to a similarly perverse eroticism, expressive simultaneously of women’s repression and liberation.
Perversion is never far from this mostly female environment. Defending her furtive acts of mortification, Remedios speaks in praise of pain, stating, “Martyrs are tortured to ecstasy, and that is the greatest pleasure that can exist.” The taking of vows has always been described and ritualised in the somewhat sexual terms of becoming a ‘Bride of Christ’ and marrying God, but wide-eyed Purificación, the woman from the opening scene, speaks of her imminent ordainment in more graphic terms (“God will welcome me into his bosom”) and even imagines that the Lord is coming – and cumming – to her at night (“He came to visit me and raised me to ecstasy”). Ana knows this is more than mere errant fantasy – for from her nearby cell, she can hear Purificación actually moaning and climaxing during the night. Despite the impeccability encoded in Purificación’s very name, there is sex in her cell.
Indeed there does seem to be somebody, or something, entering the novice’s rooms at night, and leaving them anaemic and drained, with telltale puncture marks not in their necks but on their feet and hands. Yet even as the viewer is primed to expect a vampire, and as Rubis starts to suspect the very same, it is hard to tell if vampirism in the film is real, or just a provocative figure for the workings of Catholicism. After all, in this convent dedicated to the worship and emulation of a man who rose from the dead, everyone drinks “the Blood of Christ” and eats his flesh, and a mummified head, said to have once belonged to Saint Catherine, is prominently displayed in the chapel, looking like a grotesque relic of the living dead. Vampires are built into this place and its belief system, and it does not take much to send their mythology out of the library’s occult books and into the corridors and cells, where faith and fear readily combine.
As nuns start dying, Father Rubis engages in his own investigation, desperate to exorcise the evil that is plaguing these young novices. Here Upiro is reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Name of the Rose (1986), except that, as all at once a sadist, a predator and a zealot, Rubis makes for a far more ambiguous and conflicted detective than Sean Connery’s William of Baskerville, and is as much suspect as inquisitor. At one point, he even (p)reenacts that ultimate cinematic expression of questionable Fatherhood, the final, infanticidal scenes of David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977). Yet even as the strange, shocking events in this nunnery are at last exposed to outside scrutiny and submitted to judicial review from a panel of priests and bishops who unexpectedly favour enlightened rationalism over Rubis’ demonic ravings, the cloistered confines of this convent still keep certain secrets.
Elena Muñoz’s script twists and turns in such a way that one minute you will be congratulating yourself for being so far ahead of the narrative, and the next you will not believe how lost you are, and how easily your expectations and prejudices have been manipulated. Here it is hard to be sure who to root for, or even who is the main character, as the convent must accommodate several opposing forces – economic, biological, social, sexual, supernatural – in the hope that from all the in-house horror some good might also be done. For amid all its false trails, garden paths and wild witch hunts, Upiro remains constantly, if obliquely, fixed on one theme: how difficult and how important it is for women to create and maintain a safe, sheltered space of their own within the surrounding patriarchal structure – and what, over the centuries and strictly off the record, the price has been for such a refuge, paid by women in (menstrual, puerperal or other kinds of) blood.
strap: Óscar Martín’s period gothic nunsploitationer locates several horrors – and maybe a vampire – in a remote Spanish convent
© Anton Bitel
