Gaua (2025)

Premise: Kattalin is stuck in a really bad, unhappy marriage and decides to take matters into her own hands and run away, into the grim dark forests of the basque country. It’s all very metal, including the moment she runs into three wise women (witches) that insist on telling some spooky stories that might ring a bit too close home. While drinking. Well that’s a good start!

Under 90 minutes? Yes!
Do they say the title? yes… YES!

First thing I thought of:

Okay, more: Well this was really fun! Okay okay, there were a couple of not-that-great bits, specifically (in my opinion) that at times it very clearly wanted to be The VVitch and well it was not that, also that it suffered from that “so the good guys are these, the bad guys are these and you know this from frame 2 of the movie”. The rest? Really great, super fun stuff, really cool to watch this take on folk horror and hey, it knew how to be tongue in cheek (ahem) when it should. Very very fun movie and good lord those last 20 minutes are a work of art!

A simple way to improve it: Anytime I saw Kattalin’s husband I immediately thought of Nandor, The Relentless. I miss him and Colin Robinson so much.

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

Third Spanish film of 2025 shot in Basque language and later dubbed to Spanish for different exhibitions, after Maspalomas and Karmele.

Fun fact: I watched this on Amazon Prime, one of the absolutely worst possible streaming platforms. When I hit play, it gave me the spanish dub for the movie and GOOD LORD WAS THAT PAINFUL. Like, some of the worst doblajitis in existence. Yup, I’m a snob and I don’t care what you think.