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It seemed to me a complete dud, one of those films that cannot lift their head even with Maribel Verdú in front of the camera. And I really love her, I have liked her since I was a child, so I go in already willing to give her a chance, but here there is no way. The film is solemnly bad: it wants to be psychological horror, dark tale of creepy neighbors, drama about an overwhelmed mother and cursed-building thriller, but ends up as something incoherent, clumsy, heavy and quite ridiculous.
The premise could have had a point: a mother moves with her two children into a flat that is too good to be true, in an elegant building, with a suspiciously low rent and some elderly women downstairs who begin to bother, watch and frighten the children. There was material there for something uncomfortable, with neighborhood paranoia, motherhood, guilt, social class and that feeling that your own home stops being a refuge and becomes a trap.
But the film does not know how to build fear. If it was supposed to be scary, maybe it scared the person who wrote it, because as a viewer what it provokes is mostly disbelief. Everything is told with a solemnity that does not match what it shows. The neighbors could be unsettling, but they end up looking like a grotesque trio placed there so we think "oh, how sinister", without the story managing to turn them into a truly disturbing threat.
Maribel Verdú is the best thing, of course, because she has craft, presence and a huge ability to make almost anything credible. The problem is that here she is asked to save a script beyond repair. Isabel should be a mother trapped between protecting her children, fearing the building and suspecting that nobody will believe her, but too often she is reduced to suffering, staring strangely, getting upset and moving inside a mechanism that collapses on all sides.
The children do not manage to give it the emotion it would need either. The idea of horror entering through them, through their fears, the noises, what they hear below or what they think they see, could have worked. But the film repeats the same formula too much: something bothers them, someone gets scared, Isabel becomes uneasy, the neighbors put on a mysterious face and back we go again. Instead of accumulating tension, it accumulates fatigue.
The slowness killed me. Not because a horror film has to move fast, but because here slowness feels like a way of hiding that there is not much to tell. It wants to show little, to suggest, to let the bad feeling grow, but that requires precision. It is not enough to stretch silences, add dark shots and keep the characters wandering around the building. The result is not unsettling: it is heavy.
It also fails as a psychological thriller. The film tries to play with the doubt of whether Isabel is seeing something real, whether she is losing her mind or whether the building hides something more twisted. But that game is never finely tuned. The clues are clumsy, the reactions not very believable and the revelations do not illuminate the story, they make it more absurd. Instead of thinking "what a twist", you end up thinking "what nonsense".
The section with the old women and the kind of neighborhood sect is especially bad. It could have been a nasty idea, even with a certain social bite: a building beautiful on the outside and rotten inside, a community that selects, controls and devours the vulnerable. But the film handles it in such a crude way that it ends up bordering on involuntary comedy. The old women are not scary: they make you want someone to revise the script.
And the ending is the final blow. I will not fully spoil it, but that twist involving the old women, the children, supposed madness and what was really happening seemed like total nonsense to me. The film wants everything to fit with a nightmare logic, but what it achieves is making you look back and see holes, tricks and decisions that do not hold up. It is the kind of ending that tries to elevate the story and only confirms there was no foundation.
Technically, it has a few decent things: a building with possibilities, a more or less careful staging, credits with some taste and a lead actress far above the material. But none of that compensates for the lack of tension, originality and sense. There are bad films that are at least fun, excessive or shameless. This is not even that: it takes itself very seriously while sinking on its own.
In the end, it remains for me a very bad, irregular, boring film that fails in everything important. It does not work as horror, it does not work as psychological thriller and it does not work as family drama either. It has Maribel Verdú, who is always a reason to look at the screen, but even she cannot rescue such a clumsy story. A cheap flat, strange neighbors and a lot of fake mystery ending in a mess with no force, no fear and no head.
The premise could have had a point: a mother moves with her two children into a flat that is too good to be true, in an elegant building, with a suspiciously low rent and some elderly women downstairs who begin to bother, watch and frighten the children. There was material there for something uncomfortable, with neighborhood paranoia, motherhood, guilt, social class and that feeling that your own home stops being a refuge and becomes a trap.
But the film does not know how to build fear. If it was supposed to be scary, maybe it scared the person who wrote it, because as a viewer what it provokes is mostly disbelief. Everything is told with a solemnity that does not match what it shows. The neighbors could be unsettling, but they end up looking like a grotesque trio placed there so we think "oh, how sinister", without the story managing to turn them into a truly disturbing threat.
Maribel Verdú is the best thing, of course, because she has craft, presence and a huge ability to make almost anything credible. The problem is that here she is asked to save a script beyond repair. Isabel should be a mother trapped between protecting her children, fearing the building and suspecting that nobody will believe her, but too often she is reduced to suffering, staring strangely, getting upset and moving inside a mechanism that collapses on all sides.
The children do not manage to give it the emotion it would need either. The idea of horror entering through them, through their fears, the noises, what they hear below or what they think they see, could have worked. But the film repeats the same formula too much: something bothers them, someone gets scared, Isabel becomes uneasy, the neighbors put on a mysterious face and back we go again. Instead of accumulating tension, it accumulates fatigue.
The slowness killed me. Not because a horror film has to move fast, but because here slowness feels like a way of hiding that there is not much to tell. It wants to show little, to suggest, to let the bad feeling grow, but that requires precision. It is not enough to stretch silences, add dark shots and keep the characters wandering around the building. The result is not unsettling: it is heavy.
It also fails as a psychological thriller. The film tries to play with the doubt of whether Isabel is seeing something real, whether she is losing her mind or whether the building hides something more twisted. But that game is never finely tuned. The clues are clumsy, the reactions not very believable and the revelations do not illuminate the story, they make it more absurd. Instead of thinking "what a twist", you end up thinking "what nonsense".
The section with the old women and the kind of neighborhood sect is especially bad. It could have been a nasty idea, even with a certain social bite: a building beautiful on the outside and rotten inside, a community that selects, controls and devours the vulnerable. But the film handles it in such a crude way that it ends up bordering on involuntary comedy. The old women are not scary: they make you want someone to revise the script.
And the ending is the final blow. I will not fully spoil it, but that twist involving the old women, the children, supposed madness and what was really happening seemed like total nonsense to me. The film wants everything to fit with a nightmare logic, but what it achieves is making you look back and see holes, tricks and decisions that do not hold up. It is the kind of ending that tries to elevate the story and only confirms there was no foundation.
Technically, it has a few decent things: a building with possibilities, a more or less careful staging, credits with some taste and a lead actress far above the material. But none of that compensates for the lack of tension, originality and sense. There are bad films that are at least fun, excessive or shameless. This is not even that: it takes itself very seriously while sinking on its own.
In the end, it remains for me a very bad, irregular, boring film that fails in everything important. It does not work as horror, it does not work as psychological thriller and it does not work as family drama either. It has Maribel Verdú, who is always a reason to look at the screen, but even she cannot rescue such a clumsy story. A cheap flat, strange neighbors and a lot of fake mystery ending in a mess with no force, no fear and no head.
Mini Review: It seemed to me a complete dud, one of those films that cannot lift their head even with Maribel Verdú in front of the camera. And I really love her, I have liked her since I was a child, so I go in already willing to give her a chance, but here there is no way. The film is solemnly bad: it wants to be psychological horror, dark tale of creepy neighbors, drama about an overwhelmed mother and cursed-building thriller, but ends up as something ...