Ellos volvieron (2015)

In a small Argentine town, three elementary-school-aged children disappear and, after a search, turn up on their own at their parents’ homes, naked, with external injuries and apparently in shock. Inspector Cohen of the Federal Police is subsequently sent to investigate the case, together with the mayor, a judge, the school principal, and the school psychologist. Because the children were sexually mutilated, a sex crime is suspected. In the town, which was once controlled by the Nazi Himmel family, who fled, rumors and suspicions spread, directed especially at the Nazis’ descendants. The mother of one of the children, Lucio, is particularly badly shaken. The investigation soon focuses on the old, derelict hospital, which the priest calls the town’s moral dumping ground and which the children use as a playground. The old Himmel also lives there; people avoid him, and he is insane. Shortly after the events, an incident occurs in which Himmel plunges to his death after encountering the three children. It is unclear whether he jumped or was pushed. The inspector also discovers that Lucio’s grandfather once owned the hospital and the surrounding land, but the town later expropriated it, supposedly to build a new hospital. However, according to Lucio’s mother, the mayor and the judge embezzled the government funds, and when her father sued over it, he ended up in prison. The children’s teacher, who has lived in the town for only two years, comes under suspicion of being involved. But he suspects there is much more behind the incident and tells the inspector and the school psychologist that something evil is at work here, something the town’s children are suffering from, and that this evil must be corrected. The children are actually already dead; only their souls have returned. Meanwhile, the mayor and the school principal decide that the children should be committed to a closed institution to put an end to the negative press about the town. But when the mayor encounters Lucio one night, he collapses in the middle of the street and is run over by a car. The inspector demands the files on the hospital’s expropriation from the judge, which turns her strongly against him. Lucio’s mother grows increasingly desperate about her son’s condition and seeks help from the school psychologist. More deaths follow: first, the school principal is crushed in the schoolyard by a falling basketball hoop, under the children’s indifferent gaze; then the judge suddenly collapses during a public appearance, suffering an unusually heavy nosebleed. The school psychologist hangs herself after both the children and the teacher have urged her unambiguously to do so. The inspector’s attention has by now been drawn to Lucio’s mother’s last lover, and he sets out to find the man’s trailer. Meanwhile, Lucio and the other two children have already tracked the man down. Flashbacks show how, one by one, he suffocated the children in the old hospital and then left them there naked. Their wounds were inflicted afterward by stray dogs. He murdered Lucio because Lucio was the product of incest: his grandfather had fathered him with his mother. The children make the man speed along a mountain road in his trailer until he eventually plunges into the abyss, watched by the inspector and the teacher.