The Baby Room

Title: The Baby Room
Rating: 4/5
Genre: Horror
Starring: Javier Gutiérrez, Leonor Watling
Director: Álex de la Iglesia
Language: Spanish

From a collection of Spanish films titled “6 films to keep you awake,” collating works originally made for TV on whatever budget the station would permit, I went into this one more than a little anxious as to what I would find. The promise of a traditional 'haunted house' film didn't help matters much either; a family of a loving husband, a devoted wife, and their 8 month old baby all trying to fight for their dream. Renovating an old mansion, it would appear as though their rags-to-riches tale would finally be coming to fruition but all is not as it seems in the house. During their first night they hear mysterious voices on the baby monitor, but find no trace of the source. Discarding the monitor as faulty he buys a new one with a built in camera to solve the problem, only to start seeing mysterious shapes through the monitor. With his wife never around to see the occurrences, she simply dismisses him as tired but his insistence gradually tears the family to breaking point, until he strives to rid the house of the entities that threaten his family once and for all.

It's certainly built on a budget but don't mistake this for a cheap looking take on the psychological horror style; there's none of this 'string pulling' and 'stop-motion' malarkey that plagued the recently well received 'Paranormal Activity,' nor cliché suddenly ringing phones and doorbells that have been done to death and then been done a bit more for good measure. The premise is no more complex but the result is by comparison bone-chilling, which is something I rarely seem to be able to say about horror films these days. The use of radio static may seem fairly lacklustre at first, and when the use of baby monitors come into play it could all rapidly fall apart but instead these simple devices – through the use of camera tricks – manage to shoot for initial shock scares that soon all mount up to far more than a sum of the constituent parts.

And that's simply because it's intelligent in how it goes about things; the plot acting like a Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole, forever getting deeper as the events steadily get put into context, and the slow build-up in tension of the main protagonists steadily deteriorating well being worthy of standing its own next to the likes of “The Shining,” except the denouement here doesn't fall victim to some cliché slasher story. It's all too believable; the characters react as you would expect them too, feeling like a genuine family that never behaves in a stereotypical manner, and as you gradually continue it captivates you in its grasp to the point that it all seems frighteningly plausible. By the time the finalé rolls around you understand what's going to happen but its difficult to predict the final result, as this film takes the notion into new territory that whilst not radically unique lends it a fresh feel.

There are no shortages of films that run on the haunted house theme that simply try to do too much; they over complicate things and as a result lose sight of the immense precision required in building up this tension, slowly and subtly piling on the atmosphere that it all too quickly falls apart. There are no major celebrities on show here, not even more funds than what a made-for-TV budget will allow – which if anyone has seen a SyFy film, can attest probably isn't much – and yet through its simplicity it remains one of the most effective examples of the story I can name. Only twice have I now dived into modern Spain's horror archives but both times I've come out with gold; in the wake of the supposed 'French horror revolution' and the rapidly rising reputation of Asian Horror, if the rest of their output is this good then perhaps soon it'll be the Spaniards turn to be in the spotlight.