Lucía (Ester Expósito) is having a bad day. A platform dancer at a shady nightclub, Lucía decides the best plan for her life is to steal a gigantic stash of ecstasy pills from the club’s gangster owners and sell it. But, on her way out the door, one of the bouncers/mob muscle, Moro (Fernando Valdivielso), catches her in the act. Lucía escapes, but not before Moro bruises up her face and stabs her in the leg. Her plan ruined, Lucía does what so many others do when in a serious jam: she leans on family.
Rocío (Ángela Cremonte), Lucía’s sister, has problems of her own. A single mother, she is raising young Alba (Inés Fernández) in a decrepit tower block named Edificio Venus that has been bleeding tenants for years. Tragedy after tragedy haunts the Venus’s past, and Rocío has had enough. One last night of pounding sounds coming from the ceiling has convinced her, unlike the protagonists of just about every horror movie ever made, that it’s time to get out of the danger early. Just as she and Alba are packed and in the corridor on their way to safety, the elevator opens and there is the bloodied and exhausted Lucía. That’s the setup for director Jaume Balagueró’s 2022 film Venus, which he wrote with Fernando Navarro.
What follows is a film that is split between the mob’s efforts to recover their merchandise, and the supernatural shenanigans that plague the Venus. Lucía, the film’s main protagonist, is burdened further when she wakes up the day after her arrival, and her sister is nowhere to be found. That’s three plots, which is enough to derail most films, but Balagueró and company managed to keep things tight, and they all come together in the final act well enough.
As for the supernatural stuff, early on the film implies that viewers will be getting a haunted house flick. The noises in Rocío’s apartment are classic movie ghost effects, but things are more complicated than that. The tower block is a great setting for a haunted house flick, and has been done to effect in the past. Pay closer attention to what is 
being shown, and the viewer will notice this is all façade. For one thing, there seems to be only four other tenants, who are all female. And, they seem quite at ease with living in the spookiest slum project in Madrid.
As for the gangsters, they are all despicable people. Even the nicest guy of the bunch, club manager Salinas (Federico Agaudo), is nice only in a relative sense. He’s still a piece of shit. Venus isn’t dealing with subtext when it comes to gender. The men are bad, and if the women, personified by Lucía, are not quite so good, it’s because their behavior is dictated by circumstance. The series of reveals in the final act upends much of the demarcation lines between the evil men and innocent women, though, enough to make it seem as if all the gender stuff was just windowdressing. At heart, this film is not good enough to bother with anything other than the surface features. That’s just fine, because that is where the film works best.
Venus takes place over just a couple of days. The longer Lucía is stuck in the building with her new, pseudo-parental responsibilities, the more tightly wound she becomes. With good reason. She knows the longer she stays put, the more likely that Moro and the other goons will find out where she is. They do, leading to a goon invasion of the Venus, and a decent enough finale.
Venus is an adequate horror flick. It’s not all that frightening, but the atmosphere is creepy. In many ways, it reminds me of the kind of horror movie that would come out overseas in the 1990s or early 2000s, and would be remade in short order in the U.S. with Sarah Michelle Gellar or Jennifer Love Hewitt in the lead. On a dark and stormy October night, Venus does the job.
My only substantial gripe is that not once, but twice, little Lucía kicked the stuffing out of Moro, who is about a foot taller and about seventy pounds of muscle heavier. Yes, in a film featuring the threat of supernatural cataclysm, it was the mismatched weight classes that broke my suspension of disbelief.