2026 The Dollmaker

• AKA “Encantador”
• Directed by: Jose Maria Cicala
• Written by: Jose Maria Cicala, Griselda Sanchez
• Stars: Mario Alarcon, Alejandra Baldoni, Eduardo Calvo
• Run Time: 1 Hour, 39 Minutes
• Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrXOoMVTzyA

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

In a town filled with quirky characters, Tomas leads a quiet life taking care of his mom and working two jobs with doll making and collecting as a hobby. But women are disappearing in town, and when a police inspector comes to town to help, things start getting even weirder. It’s a strange movie, kind of surreal, almost a Twin Peaks vibe. We both thought it was great.

Spoilery Synopsis

We watch some crafty credits, and then get on with it. A girl gets whacked in the head with a shovel and dragged off.

Tomas finds a doll’s head on the road on the way to the doctor’s office. He makes and repairs the world’s ugliest CPR dolls for the doctor. He then hallucinates his mother suffering in the mental ward. He then attends a group therapy session where Tina talks about her family as Tomas sketches her. The bloody ghost of her dead mother attends the session as well. He follows her most of the way home afterward.

A new inspector starts, and the police chief shows him around the town of Palacios. The chief doesn’t even carry a gun. Soon, they get another missing woman complaint. They aren’t necessarily dead, so that’s not a crime, the sheriff explains. We soon see these cops are just a little on the incompetent side.

Tomas goes home and finds his mother on the floor; she’s not well. He sometimes sees her as a big plastic doll, and he has to carry her around. He tells her about Tina, his new bride-to-be (I’m totally getting the Norman Bates vibe from him and think she’s probably really a doll).

We cut to the missing woman being handcuffed and raped in a dark room.

Tomas drives Tina to the drag-dancing-diner she works at after her next session, but he can’t stay because his mother is home waiting for him. She mentions having a daughter, but Tomas sees her with a child doll and thinks she’s delusional. Plus Tomas gets the wrong idea about her obviously-gay friend, Robert. He goes home and yells at Mother. Then he apologizes later and she forgives him.

Tomas, who works for a very weird video store, goes to a client’s house to pick up an overdue film. The police arrest Tomas outside the house, and he misses his “date” with Tina. It turns out, the house (and video) belonged to one of the missing girls. The sheriff soon releases him and chews out the dumb cops.

In case we forgot about the missing women, there’s a scene of a girl getting chopped up with a hand-saw while another captive screams watching.

At the video store, the police want a list of clients. They notice the strange locked room in the back, but they don’t have a warrant. Turns out, all the missing women were clients of the video store where Tomas works.

Tomas asks Tina to come over for dinner, so he has to clean up the house; he explains it all to Mother and then puts away all his way-too-heavy dolls. He goes to pick her up at work, but she left earlier because she got a call about a problem with her daughter. He ends up going home and throwing a tantrum.

In the morning, Tomas goes to the video store to find his boss being arrested. The boss, the doctor, and the priest are identical triplets, which confuses the police. Tina apologizes, blaming her sick child (who Tomas thinks is a doll).

We finally see Tomas in the dark room torturing the kidnapped women; yes, it really is him. He cuts out body parts, to please his mother, who really is a doll herself. He puts some real eyes in the mother-doll.

Tina comes over for dinner as promised this time. She spends the night, but in the morning, she hears screaming from another part of the house. She finds “Mother” and freaks out, running away.

At the police station, the video store boss implicates Tomas, who delivered gift cards to the victims’ house. Tina goes to work and tells Robert about the doll with real eyes and a heart– and the screams. They both wonder if it was real or if Tina is having another “episode.”

That night, Robert goes to Tomas’s house and snoops. He, too, gets a shovel to the face.

Tina and her “daughter” come to Tomas’s place to apologize, and he’s got bodies all over the place that he has to clan up in a hurry. Tomas knows his mother is a doll, and he knows Tina’s daughter is one as well. They are made for each other. He’s got a “roomful of dolls” to show the daughter.

The video store owner admits that Tomas is the polcie chief’s son, and the old man has been hiding things. Tomas killed his mother when he was very little, and there was a whole coverup by the three triplets. Soon, everyone is out searching for Tomas and Tina.

While Tina is talking, Robert crawls up out of where he was being kept, not quite dead. He knocks over mom’s ashes, Tomas freaks out and kills him with a pitchfork, Tina screams and Tomas clubs her.

Meanwhile the sheriff and the doctor kiss and then commit suicide. Tomas then gives a warm loving speech to all his collection of “dolls.” As the inspector comes in and sees what’s happened. We get to see Tomas’ last hallucination, with the assumption the inspector shot him dead.

Brian’s Commentary

That diner is even weirder than Waffle House.

The police in this town are absolutely comic-relief material. It’s weird, and a little funny in a Twin-Peaks kinda way. We don’t know for sure who the killer really is until very far into the film, although there are numerous weird characters who could have been it. There are also influences from “Psycho” here as well.

It’s a little dull and hard to follow in the beginning, but once we learn who’s who, it all gets pretty good.

It was very weird. I liked it!

Kevin’s Commentary

Tomas had a Norman Bates vibe going from early on in the movie, and I suspected early on he was the killer. And it turns out he’s even loonier than I expected.

That diner-bar-nightclub-dragshow-karaoke place where Tina works looks fun. In addition to Tomas being so whacked, the whole town has a little bit of a surreal vibe to it, full of strange characters.

It’s very strange, and I really liked it a lot.