Black Mandala
The Summoning (of Baby Blue) is an anthology of shorts designed to get under your skin. Whether it succeeds depends entirely on your tolerance for fragmented storytelling. It opens with a driver travelling through farm country who encounters a masked scarecrow on a foggy road. The imagery hints at something larger, and the emphasis on agriculture feels deliberate. But once he’s slain, the segment ends, and the film never looks back. It’s a solid hook, and I’m a sucker for a good cornfield tale, but the abrupt shift left me scratching my head.
Directed by a collective that includes Sergio Gonzalez and Felipe Vargas, the anthology eventually settles into a more familiar framework. When Laura (Valeria San Martin) finds herself alone, a small nod to Scream helps set the tone for what follows. Her friends arrive and convince her to test the “Baby Blue, Blue Baby” urban legend. It feels like an evolution of the Bloody Mary myth, shifting the fear away from mirrors and into something tactile. Once the chant begins, the participant feels an invisible burden growing heavier in their arms, and surviving the encounter becomes the challenge.
The issue is that the overarching narrative barely exists. In the version I watched, the title was shortened to simply The Summoning, which tells viewers almost nothing. The shorts themselves lack intertitles, so audiences are left waiting until the credits to discover that “Scarecrow” is separate from “Hive,” where Xochitl Gomez plays a babysitter slowly losing control of her situation.
The real substance of the anthology lies in its recurring imagery surrounding the womb. Three of the four stories revolve around primal fears tied to motherhood, pregnancy, or loss. Even the phrase “Baby Blue” feels like a grim reference to the physical reality of a lost infant. The notion of aborting and flushing away the “blue baby,” who is definitely not Grand Admiral Thrawn from Star Wars, becomes a desperate attempt to erase trauma and secrecy. The anthology leans heavily into that discomfort.
In “Carnivora,” Gigi Zumbado plays Ana, a teen burdened by caring for an elderly mother who could pass away at any moment. The segment creates an effective parallel between the invisible weight of life beginning and the crushing weight of life ending.
I kept waiting for a stronger mythological thread to bind these stories together. Had the filmmakers leaned further into myths like Isis and Osiris, where resurrection, fertility, and rebirth intertwine, the anthology might have felt more cohesive. Osiris is deeply tied to crops and renewal, while Isis often represents motherhood and restoration. Cornfields, or even dense growths of papyrus, naturally evoke cycles of death and rebirth. Those thematic connections are sitting right there in the soil, waiting to bloom.
Instead, the anthology feels like a scattered collection of compelling ideas that never fully unite. The finale struggles to land because the film never gives viewers the sense that something meaningful has truly been born from all this suffering and death.
Ultimately, The Summoning only plants the seeds of a stronger concept. Some of the shorts help nurture those themes, while others feel disconnected from the larger vision. The result is a film that hints at something richer than what ultimately appears on screen. Otherwise, audiences are left waiting for another season before the story finally germinates into a full-grown harvest.
3 Stars out of 5
The Summoning Trailer
