Rating: B-
Dir: Álex de la Iglesia
Star: Javier Gutiérrez, Leonor Watling, Sancho Gracia, María Asquerino
Initially, this starts off looking like it’s going to be your bog standard, haunted house movie. Juan (Gutiérrez) and Sonia (Watling) are a married couple with a young child, who have just moved into their new house. It’s a bit of a fixer-upper, but it has lots of character. To help keep an eye on the baby, they use a monitor – except, they start hearing a disturbing voice coming over the air, in addition to the expected baby noises. When the parents enter the room, nobody is there. Thinking it might be interference of some kind, Juan upgrades to an infra-red camera, only to see a shadowy figure sitting beside the child’s crib.
He grabs a knife, and goes to investigate, but almost stabs Sonia, mistaking her for the intruder. That triggers her into taking their son and moving out. Juan digs into the history of the house, with the help of some elderly neighbours, and also a colleague on the paper where he works. He discovers that the presence in the house can only be experienced through electronic equipment, which seems to open a passage to the other side. However, by doing so, it appears this is a route which operates in both directions. While Juan seeks to close this portal by smashing all the equipment he used in his investigation, and Sonia also returns with their child, it appears he may have been too late.
I don’t want to say more. Because, if it might seem like that generic spooky residence movie mentioned earlier… It isn’t. Not exactly. It’s only in the last third, however, that these angles start to become significant, forcing you to sit up and take notice. Much of what has gone before, is both template horror, and cunning misdirection. Things which seem important, might not be. Other elements feel almost deliberate red herrings of distraction, such as Juan flirting with the assistant who sells him the monitors. He and Sonia seem to have a very happy marriage – so what is that all about? The couple are very likeable, sometimes not the case in this genre, and this makes it easy to sympathize with them and their bizarre situation.
I do wish the truth about what’s happening had become clear earlier. It has considerably more potential, and would have merited further exploration. Instead, we get a gallop to a finish which – if satisfying enough, make no mistake – could be the opening act to a whole, new movie. There isn’t much in the way of effects here and, save one scene (top), it’s more restrained in the use of violence than you’d expect from the director of Perdita Durango. I might ascribe this to it being a TVM, except such reserve is not shown by all the entries. It is a film with which you need to show a bit of patience. I’d say the payoff, when it arrives, is worth the wait.