Rating: B
Dir: Jaume Balagueró
Star: Macarena Gómez, Nuria González, Adrià Collado, Ruth Díaz
a.k.a. Para entrar a vivir
The year before Balagueró kicked off one of the best-known Spanish horror franchises with REC, he made another film, also largely taking place in a single apartment building. Rather than disease and zombies, the threat here is a barking mad landlady (González). Her newest prospective tenants are Clara (Gómez) and Mario (Collado). are looking for a larger residence, due to Clara’s pregnancy. From the advert, this place seems too good to be true, and guess what? It is, being rundown to the point of teetering on decrepit. They make their excuses and prepare to leave. Unfortunately, the landlady isn’t the sort who takes being turned down kindly, whacking Mario upside the head, with what might be a toaster.
Turns out, she went loopy when the building was condemned and her tenants evicted. She has been luring people in with fake listings to repopulate the place, chaining them in their flats to make sure they stay put. With Mario largely out of commission, it’s up to Clara to try and find a way out of the building. What follows thereafter is a thoroughly entertaining slab of stalk and slash, fuelled by poor decisions, courtesy of Clara and Mario, plus the energetic and increasingly unhinged actions of the landlady. It is all very much dumb fun, with the emphasis equally on “dumb” and “fun”. I would recommend those who expect horror movie characters also to be MENSA candidates, to stay away.
However, for the rest of us, this is a non-stop roller coaster. While it only runs sixty-nine minutes, this feels longer. Normally, that would be a bad thing. However, here it’s a result of there being an awful lot crammed in. From the moment of toaster-fu, things don’t stop for more than a breath or two, until the end credits roll. This also helps paper over elements which might otherwise have you going, “Hang on…” Such as the feeding and care of the residents. Or the mobile phone thing, which is only not an issue here, because Carla fortuitously fell asleep on the journey and so doesn’t know where they are. Spanish police also cannot apparently locate cellphones. Hey, it was 2006. Maybe that was a thing.
That all said, I found it remarkably easy to set any such concerns aside, and just enjoy the madness as it unspooled. Gómez makes for a fine última chica: in my head canon, her character goes on to become the zombie-hunting serial killer of SexyKiller. It would be understandable, given the physical and psychological wringer through which Carla is put over the course of barely an hour here. I previously noted how thirties classics like Freaks and Bride of Frankenstein run 75 minutes or less. This has a similar sense of efficiency and urgency. It also manages to touch one of my personal fears, in fairly spectacular fashion. Let’s just say, I won’t be unclogging the waste disposal unit, any time soon.