Silver Nitrate

Montserrat is a gifted sound editor grinding through a male-dominated film industry in early-1990s Mexico City, plain and solitary where her best friend Tristán—a washed-up telenovela heartthrob—is all charm and ruin. When they discover their new neighbor is Abel Urueta, a forgotten horror director, he draws them into a strange proposition: decades ago he shot a film on volatile silver nitrate stock, meant to channel a Nazi émigré occultist's spell, and the picture was never finished. Complete it, he says, and the curse that wrecked all their lives might finally lift.

As Montserrat and Tristán reshoot the missing scenes, a malevolent presence begins to shadow them—and the ghost of Tristán's dead ex-girlfriend starts to appear. Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Silver Nitrate is an atmospheric occult horror and a love letter to the golden age of Mexican cinema, weaving magic, film history, and dread into a story about ambition, friendship, and the spells we cast without meaning to.