Tokio Films,
Florencia Colucci, Abel Tripaldi, Gustavo Alonso, Maria Salazar
This is the original 2010 film from Uruguay submitted for the academy award as best foreign language film for the 2012 Academy Awards. This is a horror film with a number of twists and turns and a huge gimmick. This film is shot to appear that it is done in a single take with a single camera. This means a single point of view, and a single location. The location is a remote house. A man and a young lady, his daughter, are brought to a remote cottage by her Uncle to clean it and prepare it for sale. The house has no light, and so this is a very dark film. Dark as in no light, as well as dark as in a really evil story!!! Laura (Florencia Colucci) hears a series of strange noises and heads out to find out (with a little help from her father) the cause of the sounds. But there a lots of secrets pressing on Laura’s mind, and a lot of side issues she’s dealing with. Supposedly based on a true story that happened in Uruguay, this is a thrilling, horrific story about murder, rape, incest, and all kinds of madness. A real trip into the macabre!
It is hard to compare the original film with it’s Hollywood counterpart. The original is more about the character of Laura and what she’s seeing and feeling. The Hollywood version jazzes up the location a bit, gives more effort into the house itself and the location. This film has a very creepy look to it, which the dark doesn’t hide very well. The story is changed a bit in the newer version, but not to any great benefit. I think I would give a little bit of an edge to the original, but not much. Truthfully both stories are not that great. The single camera shot bit is a scam. It’s not really done in one take, nor is it a big advantage to the film. As it turns out, it just robs us of a lot of things that could have been done to improve the story, and since it’s so dark, it provides us with a lot of black film with no light of any kind. I suppose sitting in a pitch dark theater with a bunch of strangers could be a bit creepy, but on video it mostly gets annoying. There is very little dialog in the whole film, so mostly we spend the 80 minutes watching Laura walk around with a lantern, looking for whatever is causing the creepy sounds. There’s a few jumps and bumps, but mostly it’s a character drama looking at Laura’s own issues. And since we never get close to her or any of the other characters, we don’t really care much.
Just an average scare fest, and whether you watch the original, or the remake, they’re about the same, and neither is that great. Just another horror flick.
EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog
