Directors: Jaume Balaguero, Paco Plaza
Writers: Jaume Balaguero, Luiso Berdejo, Paco Plaza
Photography: Pablo Rosso
Editor: David Gallart
Cast: Manuela Velasco, Ferran Terraza, Jorge-Yamam Serrano, Carlos Lasarte, David Vert, Maria Lanau
I am dutybound to report first that [●REC] is not immune from at least two of the problems people complain about with found footage films: 1) shaky confusing handheld camera scenes, and 2) there reaches a point where you wonder why the camera keeps rolling. If it makes a difference, I don’t notice these problems until well into the picture, when things have become quite strange and I am already a nervous wreck anyway—I’ve seen [●REC] a few times and it always works. You might be so caught up in it too that you don’t even notice. But whole classes of people avoid these ever more numerous found footage projects for those reasons, so that’s in the spirit of fair warning.
The premise is simple, straightforward, and believable enough. A local TV station produces a show called While You’re Sleeping, which covers urban life after dark. In this particular episode, reporter Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and a cameraman named Pablo (apparently the picture’s DP Pablo Rosso) are following a station of firemen on their night shift. We see the firemen eating dinner together, playing a game of pickup basketball, and talking about how many nights they receive no calls and only about a third are to actually put out fires. Then, of course, they get a call, and we are off.
I am dutybound to report first that [●REC] is not immune from at least two of the problems people complain about with found footage films: 1) shaky confusing handheld camera scenes, and 2) there reaches a point where you wonder why the camera keeps rolling. If it makes a difference, I don’t notice these problems until well into the picture, when things have become quite strange and I am already a nervous wreck anyway—I’ve seen [●REC] a few times and it always works. You might be so caught up in it too that you don’t even notice. But whole classes of people avoid these ever more numerous found footage projects for those reasons, so that’s in the spirit of fair warning.
The premise is simple, straightforward, and believable enough. A local TV station produces a show called While You’re Sleeping, which covers urban life after dark. In this particular episode, reporter Angela Vidal (Manuela Velasco) and a cameraman named Pablo (apparently the picture’s DP Pablo Rosso) are following a station of firemen on their night shift. We see the firemen eating dinner together, playing a game of pickup basketball, and talking about how many nights they receive no calls and only about a third are to actually put out fires. Then, of course, they get a call, and we are off.
The call is to an apartment building where neighbors are complaining an older woman has been inside her locked apartment screaming. The firemen get inside her place and find her standing in a hallway, looking confused in disheveled, bloodstained nightclothes. A hideous sight. Suddenly she attacks one of the firemen, biting him in the neck and seriously wounding him. She moves quickly and seems to have great strength. They escape, leaving one man with her and taking the wounded man down to the lobby of the building.
At this point the story both opens out and closes in. We are confronted with a disembodied voice from a megaphone outside, announcing that the building has been sealed and no one in it may leave. The voice says it is by order of public health officials as the doors are shackled and the building is literally sealed with plastic. The rest of the picture takes place inside the closed space of the building as rabid symptoms begin to manifest. Panic mounts steadily with a series of bizarre events as we try to figure out what is happening.
I’ve seen [●REC] classified as a zombie movie and I think maybe vampire too, and I can see why, but, in terms of genre, it’s probably better to think of it as simply a strange epidemic movie, at least until the end. See also David Cronenberg pictures like Rabid or The Brood (and others, come to think of it). The disease has features of zombies and vampires but as far as we see, and by the way people behave, it is more like some kind of super-rabies strain.
The main point is the picture grabs hard and does not let go, propelling us like rockets through its fast 78 minutes. Events shown can be shocking. It is already scary before the 15-minute mark and there is a jump scare cut near the end that may be the greatest jump scare cut ever put to film. As long as it focuses on the disease, whatever it is, and on how these people are trapped in the building—which is mostly all that [●REC] is—it is a relentless ride. By the halfway point the shaky cam shots really start showing up, functioning like suspense devices. Right when you really want to know something, you can’t tell what is going on. We can’t quite see it and we need to know very badly.
My favorite part of [●REC] is how it chooses to finish. It reminds me a little of the 2005 picture The Descent (also worth chasing down) in that it provides an excellent, straightforward depiction of more or less natural events—in The Descent the principals are lost and trapped inside a cave system—and then decides to go audaciously pure horror fantasy for its final act. In [●REC] that means getting into the penthouse apartment of the building, whose residents believe it is largely unoccupied by an owner who travels a lot.
It is not unoccupied, of course. For further exposition there’s a tape recording all spooled up on an old-fashioned reel-to-reel ready to play, a lot like the one the kids found in the Sam Raimi classic first Evil Dead picture. Angela is a total nervous wreck and so are we by the time she and Pablo enter this penthouse in the darkness and try to make sense of what they see from the camera’s lighting (“there reaches a point where you wonder why the camera keeps rolling”). But it makes no sense, in the most delicious way possible, and the picture ends the only way it can, on the blast of catharsis that is the song “Vudu” by Carlos Ann. In a movie otherwise with no music. Roll credits.
At this point the story both opens out and closes in. We are confronted with a disembodied voice from a megaphone outside, announcing that the building has been sealed and no one in it may leave. The voice says it is by order of public health officials as the doors are shackled and the building is literally sealed with plastic. The rest of the picture takes place inside the closed space of the building as rabid symptoms begin to manifest. Panic mounts steadily with a series of bizarre events as we try to figure out what is happening.
I’ve seen [●REC] classified as a zombie movie and I think maybe vampire too, and I can see why, but, in terms of genre, it’s probably better to think of it as simply a strange epidemic movie, at least until the end. See also David Cronenberg pictures like Rabid or The Brood (and others, come to think of it). The disease has features of zombies and vampires but as far as we see, and by the way people behave, it is more like some kind of super-rabies strain.
The main point is the picture grabs hard and does not let go, propelling us like rockets through its fast 78 minutes. Events shown can be shocking. It is already scary before the 15-minute mark and there is a jump scare cut near the end that may be the greatest jump scare cut ever put to film. As long as it focuses on the disease, whatever it is, and on how these people are trapped in the building—which is mostly all that [●REC] is—it is a relentless ride. By the halfway point the shaky cam shots really start showing up, functioning like suspense devices. Right when you really want to know something, you can’t tell what is going on. We can’t quite see it and we need to know very badly.
My favorite part of [●REC] is how it chooses to finish. It reminds me a little of the 2005 picture The Descent (also worth chasing down) in that it provides an excellent, straightforward depiction of more or less natural events—in The Descent the principals are lost and trapped inside a cave system—and then decides to go audaciously pure horror fantasy for its final act. In [●REC] that means getting into the penthouse apartment of the building, whose residents believe it is largely unoccupied by an owner who travels a lot.
It is not unoccupied, of course. For further exposition there’s a tape recording all spooled up on an old-fashioned reel-to-reel ready to play, a lot like the one the kids found in the Sam Raimi classic first Evil Dead picture. Angela is a total nervous wreck and so are we by the time she and Pablo enter this penthouse in the darkness and try to make sense of what they see from the camera’s lighting (“there reaches a point where you wonder why the camera keeps rolling”). But it makes no sense, in the most delicious way possible, and the picture ends the only way it can, on the blast of catharsis that is the song “Vudu” by Carlos Ann. In a movie otherwise with no music. Roll credits.
No comments:
Post a Comment