Horror movies about “meeting the parents” are their own subgenre. From recent favorites like Get Out, You’re Next, and Ready or Not to classics like You’ll Like My Mother, many films have filtered the real-life anxiety of meeting a partner’s family through genre violence. But the new Spanish Christmas horror movie You Are Not Me understands how this dynamic is often a bit different for queer people. The greatest terror is not meeting a partner’s parents, but through your partner meeting your own parents anew.

It’s Christmas Eve and Aitana (Roser Tapias) has overestimated her parents. She’s traveled with her partner, Gabi (Yapoena Silva), and their adopted baby, João, from Brazil to surprise her family in Spain. She imagines an excited welcome when her new family and old family join together — her queerness and Gabi and João’s Blackness ignored for a multi-generational nuclear bliss.

A stranger answers the door.

This woman introduces herself as a friend of Aitana’s parents and seems reluctant to let Aitana and Gabi inside. Upon entering, Aitana’s parents are similarly muted in their response. Only Aitana’s brother (Jorge Motos) is excited to see them. The moment then goes from disappointing to odd when Aitana goes up to her childhood bedroom only to be smacked in the face by another stranger, who will later be introduced as Nadia (Anna Kurikka).

Aitana’s parents explain that Nadia is a refugee they’ve been housing in exchange for her care of Aitana’s brother who was disabled a few years prior in an accident. Aitana spent her adolescence fighting with her parents about their conservative politics — at one point, Aitana’s mother dismissively calls her a social justice warrior — but now they’re on contradictory sides of their usual debate. Aitana’s parents are not only being kind to Nadia, but treating her like their daughter. Aitana is torn between her politics and her jealousy. She feels replaced.

This is a difficult film to discuss without revealing more. But as it unwinds toward its shocking — yet inevitable — end, its thematic game grows richer. It captures the pain of familial rejection common for many queer people, while revealing the real horror to be the ways queer people might betray their principles to win back their family’s affection.

Some of the writing scene-to-scene feels rushed with Aitana’s character seeming inconsistent and her conflicts with Gabi forced. But by the end this felt on purpose — even if it lacks some grace in execution. Aitana is a principled person, and yet in this household full of memories, when at risk of abandonment, she moves away from those principles toward a paranoid cruelty.

Roser Tapias embodies Aitana’s contradictions in a way that makes the whole film work. She’s less a final girl than the wife and husband of Rosemary’s Baby rolled into one. Alternately victim and aggressor, paranoid and justified, she’s a complicated character that feels grounded in queer reality.

While the Get Out comparisons are inevitable, the film this most recalls is actually Brian Yuzna’s 1989 masterpiece Society. Both films follow their privileged protagonists as they confront the monstrosity of their cultural upbringing. But bourgeoise selfishness is not without its temptations, and You Are Not Me lives in that complexity. By the time Aitana is faced with the ultimate choice, you’re likely to feel minimal judgment, despite the deep, deep horror.

You Are Not Me is now available to rent.

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