In the close-knit Spanish province of Tarrgona, newcomer Sara has made friends with outgoing Rebe but not much headway elsewhere with her outsider status. Her home life is awkward as well, her parents seem to be in debt to her snooty aunt (forcing Sara to deal with her shitty cousin) and her little sister (who just celebrated her first communion) is having a rough time acclimating to her new home. She seems especially upset that her communion gift was a rosary instead of a doll that all the other girls got. Not that she’s a wilting flower or anything, she’s just as into fun as the more chaotic Rebe and a night out clubbing goes just as well as it could in the late eighties when you’re mixing drugs, booze and diminishing inhibitions. After they get ditched at the club by the dude that drove them there, they end up hitchhiking and jumping in the car of a seedy drug dealer and his buddy who Sara has the hots for. They drive off into the woods because the creepy drug dealer Chivo wants to party more and as the four argue, they almost hit a young girl wandering around where she shouldn’t be in her communion dress. The guys didn’t see anything but Sara knows what she saw so she runs out of the car to look for the girl. Forcing the others to follow. Sara doesn’t find her but she does manage to find a dog hanging from a tree and an old communion doll lying under it. It freaks Pedrito out and they all decide to get the hell out of the woods, but Sara grabs the doll before they make their exit. It’s a fatal mistake. Sara grows ill and some troubling skin condition forms and spreads. Rebe enlightens Sara to the urban legend about the curse concerning the communion doll and tells her to just forget about it. Sara can’t, and goes to speak with the town’s priest about the girl she saw last night and shows him the doll she discovered as proof. The father seems disturbed but tight-lipped about it and sends her away. Paranormal activity slowly builds around Sara and the creepy-ass rotting ghost of the girl in a communion dress is seemingly trying to tell her something involving a well and drowning. But it’s a ghost, so nothing can be revealed outright. Why are spirits so convoluted about everything? Sara thinks she may be going insane, her father thinks she’s on drugs and her mother is just trying to keep things calm. Rebe reveals she has the same skin condition as Sara and they blame the drugs they took initially but eventually have to accept that things have gotten very weird and very dangerous. Secrets come to light as the desperate group attempt to figure out why there’s a supernatural force after them and how to break the curse before they end up dead as disco. You’ve seen it all before (mostly in the slurry of J-horror that followed in the wake of Ringu’s success) but it is aided by the incredibly likable turn from Aina Quiñones as Rebe (I think the filmmakers recognized this too because she is way more fleshed out than the kinda likable but mostly irritating lead, Sara) and a memorable supernatural threat that looks exactly like you’d expect the restless ghost of a water-logged girl to look.
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