Welcome to my 2026 project honoring the first quarter of the 21st century. In this extremely lax project I watch a movie from each year to hopefully give myself some insight with what has changed within cinema during this century. At the very least I’ll have watched 25 interesting films and paired them with a dinner inspired by the movie, the place its from, and maybe a little bit of nostalgia for the past 25 years. You can watch along with me or find out what’s up next by checking out the full list of movies.
Today’s feature is from the year 2021, where we are headed to Spain to follow a UFO cult…
Movie: Espíritu sagrado [The Sacred Spirit]
Year: 2021
Director: Chema García Ibarra
Country: Spain
The Elevator Pitch: After the sudden death of their group leader, a UFO cult decides to continue their ritual to save humanity.
How Was the Movie?:
You ever get completely crushed by a movie?
Anyway I guess I thought this satire/tragicomedy was going to be a ‘haha’ black satire and not a ‘sit alone with your thoughts’ satire. I have nothing but praise for the movie because it’s so intricately filmed and thought out. There is a distinct mix of naturalistic acting and deliberate use of camera angles and cuts makes the film a tense and tragic thing that is still lingering with me weeks after having watched it.
While it must have felt very ‘of the moment’ in 2021 its themes and ideas are only more intense and pertinent 5 years later. From the list of movies we already watched this is easily both the darkest and the most salient to the modern time which makes it more distressing and eerie than it already was.
The vibes of this movie range from Twin Peaks to Drive but it has its own terse, strange mood that makes the very normal town of Elche float between reality and unreality that the cult member characters also exist in. The movie seriously explores the absurdism of cult as community as it evolves and unravels its meaning and consequences for the main character. That the cult isn’t just a part of these peoples lives, it is their lives despite the fact that it’s just a dozen people meeting in a community center and making their own plans disconnected from the world around them. They aren’t living in the real world despite being engulfed in it.
The main character has a deep faith that reads almost as supernaturally gullible which can be hard to swallow for a lot of people but the main event at the center of the film spirals out with a meta life of its own over the course of the film that is repeatable and accurate to real life so I think those two elements are in a good balance.
There’s a lot of films this reminded me of but the truth is that it is kind of its own animal diving into faith, poverty, local tragedy, and the types of dangerous things that spawn from a distinct type of disconnection people have to the world.
What was for Dinner?:
For dinner I made Pisto Con Huevos which is basically if ratatouille and shakshuka had a baby. While this is a perfectly serviceable dish I actually prefer to make regular shakshuka for a number of reasons. Pisto doesn’t seem to be flavored with very much but salt, pepper, and the occasional paprika which sounds very clean but in practice meant it was kind of just tomato flavored for the most part. I wish I had put some roasted peppers in it which would have helped but it needed some spice or some spices to elevate it to the next level. I also served it with some rye ciabatta which I didn’t love as much as the naan I usually eat shakshuka with.
Obviously all these issues can be easily remedied if you make the dish yourself but I wanted to be more down to Earth and authentic and then I felt silly when it kind of backfired on me.
That’s it for 2021, see you in the future year of 2022!