- Directed by: Pedro Martin-Calero
- Written by: Isabel Pena, Pedro Martin-Calero
- Stars: Ester Exposito, Mathilde Ollivier, Malena Villa
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 47 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGg0YgScDoE
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
In different times and locations, an invisible entity that only shows up on film stalks and torments several young women. It looks really good, with skilled acting and direction, but the story and explanation is a little lacking. It moves slowly, mostly steadily, and then ends kind of abruptly. Neither of us found it very satisfying.
Spoilery Synopsis
We open up to a woman at a party. She meets a guy there and they go to a dance club. As the strobes come, she has some kind of attack.
We cut to a small family having dinner. The oldest girl, Andrea, asks if there’s any news, and the father says no.
Andrea, 2022
Andrea’s in the middle of some Facetime sex with a boyfriend when the power goes out. On the way home from school, she hears someone crying, but there’s no one around on the street. Her boyfriend, Pau, is in Sydney and having a good time without her. She sends him a selfie, and he says he sees someone else in the room with her. She looks at the video, and there is someone there behind her. It’s just her father… maybe.
Andrea’s father talks to her about her adoption process back in 1999. They all live in Madrid, but she’s from Argentina, which displeases her. Also, her birth mother is dead. When Andrea researches her mother, Marie, she reads that she was a murderer who killed her friend Camila.
She looks at videos on her phone, and a lot of them have someone dark and shadowy standing in the background, just out of sight. Pau wants her to come visit, and they talk over a video call. She sees someone dark standing begging him in the video. This time, the figure comes out and beats Paul to death right on camera as she watches.
She tells her friends, but no one really believes the man who only exists on the camera is real. She starts sleeping with her camera on. We watch as the creepy man lays down next to her as she sleeps.
Two months pass, and her parents are concerned about her phone addiction problem. Andrea thinks there is something about her birth mother, Maria, that no one is telling her.
Walking home at night with her friends, they all heard the wailing in front of that same building. This time, she goes inside to investigate. Andrea sorta remembers this building from Argentina. Something bad happens in the dark, and Andrea gets locked inside with “the man.”
Camila, 1998
We cut to Camila in a film class, and she’s the smart one in the room. This is Camila, in La Plata, in 1998. She takes a bulky video camera out into the world to film “something real.” She sees an interesting-looking girl and follows her around for a while. The girl turns out to be Marie. The teacher doesn’t like the resulting video.
While out shooting, she hears a wailing cry near a familiar-looking building. She sneaks back to film Marie some more, and this time, she sees the same creepy bald man that we saw in Andrea’s video. He shows up again in several of the previous videos that she hadn’t noticed before.
Camila goes to the dance club looking for Maria and they soon become friends and spend the night together. Maria says she’s cursed and thinks she’s going crazy. Camila finds a used pregnancy test in the trash. Marie’s father talks about her mother to Camila; crazy seems to run in the family, but he won’t get specific.
Camila shows the videos to Maria, and she doesn’t know anything about the creepy old man. Suddenly, something invisible kills Camila and starts fondling Marie, just like in the video.
Marie
Marie, still in shock over all that, runs off, leaves her mother to find Camila’s body. She tells her father about the old man in the film, and maybe he’s the one who made her own mother crazy. He explains that no, her mother killed herself.
She goes to that same abandoned building and breaks in. The place is empty, but she still hears crying. The place seems to be full of crying ghosts, including her mother. The old man appears and then throws her out, where she’s arrested for murder…
Back in 2022, Lisbeth, Marie’s sister. Gets a call about Andrea from Andrea’s mother that “it’s happening again.”
Lisbeth 2023
The story continues, but the film does not.
Brian’s Commentary
It’s really slow moving, but it continually ramps up the mystery. Who is this weird old man and why does he keep showing up on video?
It’s well made, and the locations are interesting, but there’s not much here, plotwise, that we haven’t seen before, and it’s just way too slow-moving.
And then it all just kinda ends. We don’t know who the old man is, why this is happening, and why that family gets to suffer.
Kevin’s Commentary
So, there’s a strange old man who is invisible and only shows up on video. But he can abruptly kill people and move things in the physical world because… We’re never told who he is or why he is and there’s nothing that could be done against him. Perhaps he’s supposed to be a metaphor for grief and madness or something but I didn’t pick up on that.
It’s a well made, well acted, well directed movie that failed to connect with me or impress.
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