After a rather graphic scene where John murders a couple in their own home before removing their eyeballs, you (the viewer) will notice the screen starting to look grainy, slightly jittery, and heavy on print damage. This comes at the 20 minute mark after our characters are already established and plot is starting to unfold. The camera pans down to reveal an audience watching what WE have been watching. Turns out, we haven’t been watching Anguish, but instead have been watching a feature titled ‘The Mommy’. In a surprising turn of events, the plot then shifts to a crowded movie theater.

It’s surprising to get a twist like this only one-forth of the way into any movie. I’m reminded of the big surprise in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) where the lead character is killed off, also at the 20-minute mark. Coincidence? I have been enjoying the movie I was watching, but now the movie wants to take us on another roller coaster, all while still riding the same coaster. What follows is cross-cutting between what is happening in the theater and the movie the theatergoers are watching. Anguish was edited by a Tom Sabin and is one of very few projects he ever worked on. It’s amazing what skill went into the editing here. Cutting between 2 stories going back and forth and syncing up perfectly at the end, all while still editing their own individual stories.

Focus is now on theater spectators where a montage of hypnotic images and the sounds of mother’s voice fill the auditorium and affect some audience members in a deep way. The setting in ‘The Mommy’ shifts its way into a movie theater as well. This is where the editing shines, progressing 2 stories at once in the same setting.

One theater attendee that ‘The Mommy’ has affected mentally the most is a pale man who believes the film is reaching out to him specifically. He appears to be hypnotized and calls out to mommy. In return, mommy tells him to murder everyone in the theater. We are then shown this hypnotized man take a loaded weapon, kill the employees in the lobby, tie up the auditorium doors, and commit a mass shooting.

This conclusion makes Anguish feel more relevant today than ever. It’s a gut punch and hurts for a long time. It echoes the sad reality of how big a problem mass shootings in the U.S. have become over the past decade. I don’t believe it was ever the director Bigas Luna’s intention to put a message in his film about the sad state of gun violence in America, it just happened to become that way. Or I could be totally wrong and that we just haven’t fixed any of America’s problems since 1987. Now with mass shootings in schools, businesses, and even movie theaters, Anguish is a film that strangely feels ahead of its time.