Luis Fernandez plays the lothario star of a horror-themed soap opera. After a recent and extremely embarrassing breakup with his co-star (Úrsula Corberó), Fernandez attends a party at a remote estate. He wakes up the next morning not remembering a whole helluva lot from the wild night before. He’s also still at the house where the party was held, and is locked inside the hermetically sealed house with three young women (played by Alicia Sanz, Ana Caldas, and ‘ugly duckling’ Rocio Leon), whom he may or may not have been intimate with last night. With not much of an idea of how things ended up the way they are now, nor any idea how in the hell they can get out of this place, the quartet must further contend with a masked killer on the prowl, picking them off one-by-one.
Co-written and directed by Miguel Larraya, this 2013 horror pic from Spain never quite delivers the goods, and features a main character you’ll hate before the opening credits are finished. The dull lead performance from Mr. Fernandez doesn’t much help. It’s quite an attractive film, but giving us a bunch of self-absorbed, self-serving reality TV stars and irritating wannabes as characters results in a hollow centre. The inserts from ‘fans’ lamenting the breakup of the central duo, are also irritating and phony. In fact, the film’s treatment of the TV stuff, never seems convincing, and yet the film’s not a “Scream”-like parody of horror, either.
The title is perfectly chosen and the basic idea here is pretty cool (being locked in a house you’re not overly familiar with, alongside characters you also don’t know terribly well), but for all the beautiful young Spanish women on display here (Alicia Sanz in particular is simply gorgeous), it’s hard to care. Fernandez is kind of a douche and they’re all ugly girls on the inside. Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the audience connection/investment in that?
The film is undeniably well-directed and well-shot, it’s just not much of a movie, really. It’s not a terrible film at all, but it’s rather slight, and it’s not violent enough, nor are the characters interesting enough to make up for its screenplay deficiencies. Not every horror film has to be violent, but this film definitely could’ve used some gore, given it’s hardly in the league of “Halloween”. Meanwhile, the director’s nice sense of style can only take things so far with this slight and transparent script (co-written by Fernando Sancristóbal Zurita). If you can’t guess where this thing is headed after 20 minutes, welcome to your first movie experience. I hope you enjoyed it a lot more than I did. Still, I wouldn’t mind seeing what the director does next, hopefully with a better screenplay.
OVERALL SUMMARY
A borderline OK film at best that just isn’t meaty enough, despite an intriguing mise-en-scene. There’s also not one redeeming character in the whole thing. When will horror filmmakers learn that in order to care about the film, we have to want to follow the characters who inhabit the film? It’s not rocket surgery, people.
