13 Souls — 13 souls( VOD)
Brazilian filmmaker Paulo Nascimento, best known for the dramas A Oeste do Fim do Mundo and Em Teu Nome, makes his English-language debut in 2026 with the supernatural horror film 13 Souls. Dripping in heavy-handed atmosphere, it joins the legacy of young-girl-possessed films. But while it adds a mighty mythological twist, it’s let down by an overearnest approach and an underworked script.
Fifteen-year-old Agne (Sienna Belle) moves in with her estranged father, Ariel (Tim Shelburne), and older sister Nina (Brielle Tucker) after the death of her mother. It’s immediately clear that something is very wrong with the girl, as she’s hostile to her sister, shouts at visions, and is obsessed with the cemetery where her father works and she and her sister used to play. Her father’s worries lead him to Father Melchior (Bernard Applewhaite), a maverick, ailing priest who has a mysterious link to the 13 unidentified bodies interred in the cemetery, all victims of an elevator fire decades before.
The main issue dogging 13 Souls isn’t the exploration of possession and the fight between good and evil from beyond the grave, but a stodgy script. 13 Souls is packed with horror, jump scares, and corpses stalking Ariel’s house and the cemetery, but it can be a bit much. A hiss on the soundtrack when a corpse’s hand falls on a shoulder is good, but not when it’s from a supportive, if rotting, mother. It makes you wonder if this is a case of ambiguity being badly mishandled. But Nascimento and his co-writers Brittnay Johnston and Flavio de Castro Barboza don’t leave much room in such a direct screenplay. The script shuns all humour for a worthy, heavy labouring of the familial horror. Its determination to be straight-faced means it struggles to get anywhere.
The structure runs a bit like The Exorcist, as you might expect, but it’s a flat and condensed version. Instead of a lamplight, a lightning bolt fizzles when Father Melchior first arrives at the ramshackle family home to meet the girl who tells him, “You should have got in that elevator.”
Shelburne has some recent form in horror films, but here he’s saddled with a pretty thankless worrying dad role. It takes just one day of Agnes stabbing him in the hand and seeing things to drive him to a church. All the cast struggle with the script, but the worst off may be Sergio Myers II’s Michael, there to help connect Ariel and Melchior, who gets the roughest end of the stick and most ludicrously gory death (unlucky when he’s competing with another character who either digs graves in one scene and is set alight in another).
The speed of Ariel pursuing exorcism as the answer to his woes (“My daughter seems to be possessed by something really bad”) is balanced by heavy, if woolly, exposition on the other side. Anyone expecting things to end in a mighty exorcism is likely to be disappointed, although there is some obligatory levitation. Most of 13 Soul’s interest in delivering the twist around its titular spirits, but even that’s heavy-handed. The elderly priest’s exorcismal exposition and his personal involvement in the Bronx Fires of the 1970s, latching onto real events grounded in socioeconomic factors, feel clumsy.
Nascimento paints a vivid image, with swirly shots and the constant use of angled and low shots to match his topic. But despite the disorientating results, 13 Souls is a disappointingly unoriginal film, desperately in need of more substance.