Reviews

Horror may be the most derivative genre, so we fans usually have a pretty good idea of what to expect. The writers of this movie know that, and play with our expectations. The movie tries to get us as emotionally wrapped up as possible in the woman's desperate quest to figure out if 1. There really are entities or 2. It's all in her head. Those are the only two possible explanations movies like this normally give us, but in the end we get an explanation that's neither of the two. I wasn't crazy about the "house hated back" explanation, but at least it was something different, and horror doesn't give you something different very often. Then in the movie's last shot, when the camera slowly zooms in on the closet door that.had acted up so much, any horror fan is going to be waiting for the inevitable stinger ending, where we find out the horror isn't over after all. But the closet door doesn't do anything, and then they roll the credits. I take this to mean that the house is back to normal now, without the woman's anger there to rile everything up.

I mostly liked this movie, but I don't like the way writer/director Nacho Vigilando used this woman more like an object than a character. She goes out of her way to show kindness and patience to a stranger, but we never find out her name or a single piece of information about her. Her body is full-frontally exposed for no practical reason, and the protagonist, Hector, repays her kindness and patience by sacrificing her so he can have his wife back. He tells her she's beautiful first, which apparently is his idea of compensation for what he's about to do to her. The women in this movie are unusually compliant and unquestioning. And this isn't the last time Vigilando would have his protagonist order a woman to disrobe, he did the same thing years later in "Open Windows."