White Coffin: A Typical “Rural” Fantasy

De la Vega collaborated on White Coffin’s script with Ramiro and Adrián Garcia Bogliano; Luciano Onetti provided the music score. The film examines the possibility of a mother committing infanticide, “something that could be scarier than her own death.”6 The mother, Virginia, is on the run with her young daughter Rebecca (Fiorela Duranda) after a custody hearing has awarded the child’s custody to her estranged husband. Virginia will resort to desperate measures to keep Rebecca, culminating in the savage act of which de la Vega speaks. In The Hollywood News’ White Coffin review, Kat Hughes writes that it is about “the lengths a parent will go … to save their child from harm.”7 To this end, White Coffin’s plot itself functions as a kind of game designed to bring de la Vega’s hypothesis to light (indeed, the film’s subtitle translated is The Diabolic Game).

White Coffin opens on an isolated road. Virginia and Rebecca are fleeing from the husband. As they drive, they play a word association game (marking the beginning of the diabolical game of the title). They drive past the poster for a missing child, Natalia Coba, a sure sign of events to come. Later, de la Vega will explicitly reference John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976); specifically, the Assault scene where a child is brutally gunned down as she buys ice cream. Child murder will become a link between the two films, as will the rigorous formalism of Carpenter. As Chris Banks remarks of White Coffin, it all begins in “relatively disciplined fashion.” De la Vega’s deployment of classical Hollywood style à la Carpenter makes the film’s subsequent departure into the Latin American tradition of the fantastic all the more startling.

As they stop near a cemetery, Rebecca becomes strangely fascinated by the graves. De la Vega frames her between headstones, seen from behind, her white crochet hair bun given prominence in the shot. From here on, images of Catholicism suffuse White Coffin: Old World religion pitted against the ritual sect behind the diabolical game that Virginia is forced to play. In many ways, we might read White Coffin as a comment on the failure of Catholicism in Argentina: a country where over 75 percent of the population is Roman Catholic but non-practicing; where religious beliefs have become largely deinstitutionalized. The imminent abduction of the child is already planted firmly in our minds. (Significantly, the town near which they have broken down, Moriah, owes its name to the Biblical mountain on which God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac.) As Virginia changes a blown tire, she looks up and sees that Rebecca has vanished from the front seat. We share her panic until she spots her daughter on the roadside, Rebecca having stepped out of the car.

A mysterious stranger comes to Virginia’s aid. Mason (Rafael Ferro) is a gaucho figure, a go-between who traverses the present and the past, Virginia’s reality and the savagely fantastical world of the cult; it is he who will raise Virginia from the dead for a brief reprieve in order for her to save Rebecca (or at least make the attempt). And it is through Mason that the diabolical game is given shape. After Rebecca is abducted from a service station diner, Virginia chases the pick-up truck in which her daughter is held. The chase results in Virginia being killed in a crash. At this point, White Coffin moves into the realm of the fantastic, and in so doing, shifts from American horror movie traditions to Argentine ones. Carpenter is supplanted by Vieyra as, in a direct homage to the scene in Blood of the Virgins, Virginia is brought back to life in her casket by Mason, who literally pulls her by her hand from her grave.

The rules of the diabolical game gradually become known. Rebecca is one of three kidnapped children to be sacrificed by the cult. Virginia has to track down the titular white coffin and deliver it to the cementerio de Moriah where the children are held captive. She has only one day among the living to do this and save her child. What’s more, she is in competition with Patricia (Verónica Intile) and Angela (Eleonora Wexler)—the mothers of the other children—for possession of the white coffin. Thus, we first assume that the game is diabolical because it pits mothers against each other for the lives of their children: Which of them is prepared to become the most savage in her attempt to save her child?

A good bit of the film’s 70 minutes is devoted to the chase for the white coffin. The three women converge on a remote warehouse where the coffins are made. The game is diabolical, too, in the way that it involves the sacrilegious use of Christian symbols. The “carpenter” here is not Joseph or Jesus, but a maniac who cuts Patricia in half with his buzz saw. The dead woman’s daughter is subsequently the first child to be sacrificed: burned to death while her screams are relayed to the two surviving mothers by mobile phone. A priest is shown to be complicit in the game; indeed, Catholicism becomes increasingly implicated by the film to the point where rituals of the Church become indistinct from those of the cult. In White Coffin, Catholicism has not only failed, but is inextricably tied to the barbarism of the past and the present.

Thus, the film reaches its crescendo in the cementerio. Here, de la Vega’s hypothesis comes into its own. Virginia stabs Angela and, as the surviving mother, is given one final task: She must herself sacrifice the child who is not her own, by placing her in the white coffin on a funeral pyre. This she does, but the atrocity of the act results not in reward, but in punishment, so exquisitely cruel as to reveal the game’s true diabolical nature. Rebecca is not to be freed; instead, she is to continue the cycle of sacrifice as a newly inaugurated cult member. She is to become an agent in the diabolical game. She is taking the place of the disgraced priest (whom Virginia has beheaded); her scalp, like that of the priest, is inked with a map designed to lead future victims of the game to Moriah.

White Coffin ends with Mason, the gaucho, leading Rebecca away from the cementerio as the distraught Virginia finally runs out of time. The mother brought back from the dead to save her child, and who would go to any lengths (even descend into barbarity) to do so, dies gripping the cross of a gravestone, her own “resurrection” failed.