thomas4cinema

A camera and reporter team follows the night shift of the Barcelona fire brigade for a documentary. When thet are being called into a house where neighbours heard screams from the apartment of an old lady, things turn bad. Apparently, a disease is spreading in the house, turning whoever is inside into raving crazies. Health authorities seal off the house, leaving those inside alone in their fight, and in their search for what is behind the whole epidemic. The solution may be found in the penthouse flat.
Shaking hand-camera, off-camera reporter voices, shouting and screaming and moaning from all over the house, patchy or no light, infrared shots, biting senior citizens and children, and a proper ghoulish monster thingy. The film has everything you expect a film to have that sets out to scare you. It has been designed following clear genre profiles, and works extremely well at that. Frightening atmosphere of ignorance while the epidemic unfolds and the people trapped realise how bad their situation is. Even a back story explaining about the source of the infection – necessary or not, it allows for a nice final drama stage, where the ill fate of the tv crew culminates. From what I hear, vastly superior to the US remake released in late 2008, and I truly do not see a reason to remake this film in the first place, as part of the charme for an international audience comes through the Spanish character of the setting.