Review: REC

Dir. Jaume Balaguero & Paco Plaza. 2007

While filming a piece covering the night shift at a local fire station, a Spanish TV reporter and her cameraman attend a call to an apartment block, where an elderly resident has been heard screaming. Soon after they arrive, a policeman is viciously attacked by the same resident. When the fire-fighters and TV crew attempt to seek medical assistance, they find themselves unable to leave: the whole building has been sealed by the Centre for Disease Control. No one gets in or out. Nobody is telling the quarantined residents anything. People are beginning to get sick. And through it all, the TV camera rolls on...

REC is a truly frightening piece of cinema that makes the most of the current ‘found footage / reality TV’ trend. The acting and dialogue (the latter via subtitles) seem completely realistic and unrehearsed, with the occasional lapse into irrelevancies and inconsequentials providing an unsettling counterpoint to the moments when all hell breaks loose. Some of the themes incorporated will be familiar to horror fans, but there’s plenty of originality too. And the constant switch between scenes of tension and those of action-packed terror is guaranteed to shred the viewers’ nerves.

If I have any complaints to make here, it’s simply that I don’t speak Spanish. While the subtitles certainly do a more than adequate job of keeping an English-speaking audience abreast of what’s going on, it’s sometimes hard to focus on the print when set against the constant movement of a hand-held camera.

That aside, though, this is one of the most perfect horror films I’ve ever said: utterly compelling, with an uncomfortably realistic human core, a minimum of gore (despite the cannibalistic tendencies of the ‘infected’), and an ending that will leave you unwilling to turn the lights out after viewing, particularly if you live in an apartment block.

As an aside, I’ll be very interested to compare this movie with the US remake, Quarantine, particularly with regards to the apparent ‘conspiracy’ element of the latter, suggesting that the quarantine event was covered up by the authorities (this is not the case in the original). Also, for those interested, a sequel to REC is currently in the works: a recent teaser trailer suggesting that the movie picks up immediately where the first one concluded, as special ops forces enter the same building, flinching nervously as weird screams emanate from somewhere above... Brr!