TFTHE FILMREVIEW · 50K FRESH TAKES
Legions — poster
← ALL FRESH TAKES

SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW

Legions: beyond the familiar story of family ties.

Legions · 2022

A source-led reading of Legions as horror: family ties, creation, documented consensus, and the counterpoint that shifts the conclusion.

THE FILM EDITORIAL DESKAugust 31, 2026303 WORDS
01

THEMATIC CENTER

family ties
02

NARRATIVE PRESSURE

creation
03

FORM

horror
04

RECORD ANCHORS

festival · argentina · spanish

The record for Legions yields three coordinates specific to its premise—festival, argentina, and spanish. That vocabulary places family ties at the center and gives creation its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.

Legions brings family ties into contact with creation through horror. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: A film worth discovering for its voice, its moment and the point of view of the people who made it.

Legions (2022) arrives with the coordinates of a surnaturel horreur film situated in 2020s cinema. The record credits Fabián Forte with the direction and places Germán de Silva and Ezequiel Rodríguez in the foreground. With a contained running time, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.

Read as horror, the film carries the pressure of creation. Family becomes less an automatic refuge than a system of debts, loyalties, and roles waiting to be renegotiated. The most precise critical test is therefore the human cost of the creative act beyond its result. The starting point is neither automatic approval nor suspicion. It is curiosity about construction: how do familiar elements combine to produce a particular voice, experience, or resistance?

The counterpoint asks not who belongs to the family, but who has the right to redefine its rules. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of family ties, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. The counterpoint replaces immediate reaction with a map: decisions, consequences, resistance.

THE VERDICT, REFRAMED

The twist: replace the rating reflex with close attention to decisions. Here, family ties changes meaning under the pressure of creation.

THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT

Legions (Spanish: Legiones), also known as Cosa e' Mandinga, is a 2022 Argentine supernatural horror film written and directed by Fabián Forte. It stars Germán de Silva as Antonio Poyju, a powerful sorcerer who must escape from a psychiatric hospital and find his daughter Helena (played by Lorena Vega)—who has forgotten her magical powers—in order to counter demonic forces wreaking havoc across Argentina. Legions was filmed in Buenos Aires and Misiones Province, Argentina. It premiered in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on 5 January 2022, and screened at several film festivals throughout the year, including the Fantaspoa Festival, Sitges Film Festival and the Fantasia International Film Festival. The film was released by XYZ Films in North America on video-on-demand (VOD) on 19 J

Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.
Year
2022
Runtime
88 min
Direction
Fabián Forte
Performers
Germán de Silva · Ezequiel Rodríguez · Mariana Anghileri