When Jacob (William Hurtado), a pastor’s son, prepares for his drag debut, he faces consequences greater than he imagined in “Rains Over Babel,” a sultry, sexy, and stylish film about an assortment of misfits wasting time in a Colombian nightclub that is more than it seems.
The titular Babel isn’t your average hang; it’s a purgatory for wayward souls. Gala del Sol, writer and director, examines afterlife myths, matching his outcast characters with the levels of purgatory from Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy.” Yes, there is even a character named Dante (Felipe Aguilar Rodriguez), but he’s more of an angel of Death bartering for his immortal soul, or, more to the point, hoping to retire. Rodriguez smolders on the screen.
A sexy Luciferian bartender, El Boticaro (Santiago Pineda), and his mute, guardian angel wife, Erato (Sofia Buenaventura), watch over the bar. El Boticaro, an omniscient narrator, introduces the strange cast of characters who inhabit (you might say ‘haunt’) the club with Jacob. Pineda is a sexy devil, dressed in a diaphanous aqua shirt and dark eyeliner. Buenaventura is equally sexy, delivering longing looks with soulful eyes.
La Flaca (Saray Rebolledo) is Lady Death, a card sharp playing for the gambler’s longevity; her currency is years of life instead of coins. These aren’t spoilers; the exposition is doled out in the first five minutes of the movie.
“Rains Over Babel” is a (sort of) Spanish-language film with a mumblecore vibe. It’s not a silent film, exactly, but no one speaks the dialogue out loud. The sound effects are all there: the rain, a horse’s whinny, and clinking glasses in the bar, but the voices are muted, and the dialogue is revealed in subtitles. When the pastor, Jacob’s father (Roman Escobar), delivers his sermon, only barely audible mumbles are heard throughout his congregation.
The characters —there are a lot of them —are intriguing. Dante works for La Flaca as her Grim Reaper, but his contract is about to expire. He must get a magic amulet (a salmon-colored crystal) to her before a song, “The Taste of Guayaba,” ends, or he will be committed to twenty more years as Death’s right-hand man.
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There are a lot of storylines struggling for “airtime,” but del Sol deftly juggles the disparate threads with aplomb. There are snakes, couches that swallow people whole faster than J.D. Vance can make love to one, and an assortment of violent deeds. Rebolledo chews the opulent scenery as Death. Her cackle is downright devious.
With ghosts trying to win their body back, devils and drag queens, it’s the perfect Dia de Los Muertos afterparty, sort of a grown-up, LGBTQ+ “Coco.”
The film won the Panorama España Grand Jury Award at the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival in April 2025. It went on to win the Jury Award for Best First Feature at the Inside Out Film and Video Festival in Canada in May 2025.
“Rains Over Babel” makes its Pittsburgh premiere on Thursday, November 13 at 8:00 pm at the Harris Theater as part of the Three Rivers Film Festival.
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