Review: ‘Crazy Old Lady’ will make you go mad

Martín Mauregui’s Vieja Loca (or Crazy Old Lady) makes good on the crazy part. With a taut, emotionally affecting script, the writer/director explores the ravages of dementia and its aftershock effects on loved ones. He approaches the story very much grounded in reality, but turns up the heat until it all boils over in alarming and uncomfortable ways. Mauregui roots around the darkest corners of the soul and shakes loose all the cobwebs of the mind, crafting a cursed story that already makes a bid for the best of 2026. Sure, it’s only February, but we’ll be talking about this one for a long time.

It’s unclear if Alicia (Carmen Maura) is simply senile or suffers from an extreme case of dementia. Either way, she can’t live alone, so her daughter Laura (Agustina Liendo) hires a live-in nurse to care for her. The film opens with Laura accepting a call from Alicia, who is dead set on baking a very special dessert. Over the next several minutes, Alicia calls again and again, each time asking for the recipe and mentioning a man named César. You can feel Laura’s desperation and sadness as she listens to her mother’s rapid deterioration. When she learns that the nurse fled, leaving Alicia alone and confused, Laura dials up her ex-husband, Pedro (Daniel Hendler), to ask if he can check on Alicia until she gets there.

Pedro reluctantly agrees. When he arrives, a thunderstorm rages outside, the perfect backdrop of Mauregui’s truly horrifying campfire tale. Pedro thinks he knows what he’s about to walk into, but he has no clue how far Alicia has gone from sanity. Believing him to be the mysterious man César, she ties Pedro to an armchair with chains and leather straps. Through various bits of dialogue, we learn that César was an evil man, and Alicia hints that he abused her every chance he got. He could be real, or he could be a hallucination. What transpires over the next hour and a half is a night of pure hell. Pedro is just a mouse in Alicia’s sadistic games of mental and physical torture.

A one-location horror film, Crazy Old Lady makes you feel every ounce of Pedro’s misery. Maura and Hendler dig their fingers into the material until they, perhaps literally, draw blood. Maura is particularly frightening as Alicia in her ability to switch from an aloof grandmother to a scheming psychopath in the blink of an eye. As her scene partner, Hendler matches her beat-for-beat with fiery emotional punches required for such a meaty role. And neither actor plays it on one note. There are highs and lows to their performances that hook you in like piranha teeth and refuse to let you go.

Martín Mauregui masterfully touches on the impacts of dementia while also delivering bone-chilling scares. It’s a wild roller coaster ride that rarely gives you a moment to breathe. And that’s the best kind of horror. Crazy Old Lady is unexpectedly a cathartic experience in its use of violence, intense style (such a light and color), and how the third act leaves it all on the floor. It’s the sort of horror story that makes you squirm in your seat, whether you want to or not. It’s that good.

Crazy Old Lady arrives on Shudder next Friday (February 27).