Reporter Angela Vidal and her cameraman Pablo are recording a "night in the life of..." piece on the firemen who work the night shift in Barcelona when a call comes in about an elderly woman trapped in her apartment. Angela and Pablo go with the firemen as they respond to the call. When they get to the apartment building, they are met by a few police officers and some residents of the building, all confused and concerned about what is going on with the screaming woman in the apartment.
The firemen break down the woman's door and search the apartment, finally finding the woman standing in bloody clothes and in some sort of a psychotic state. When the head police officer attempts to approach her, she bites him in the neck, wounding him terribly. This sets off a chain of events that sees the building quarantined, sealed with plastic sheeting, and patrolled by armed police officers intent on keeping anyone from leaving. Angela, Pablo, and the others must try to find a way out of the building while also avoiding and fending off those who have been infected by the same virus - if that's really what it is - that made the old woman turn violent and aggressive.
[REC] is presented entirely as a view from Pablo's camera, in the "found footage" style that horror fans have become all too familiar with. Found footage movies have permeated the genre in the last decade or so, giving audiences a personal, close-to-the-action view of the horror - a view that is often obscured by the sickening overuse of the "shaky cam" shooting and editing style that comes from letting amateurs (in the context of the movie) hold the camera. [REC] cleverly gives the camera to a character who is a professional, thereby justifying the filmmakers' ability to present the horror in a surprisingly good-looking movie that doesn't make you want to vomit every time the cameraman runs up a flight of stairs.
[REC] succeeds in bringing us along for the ride at a careful pace. Despite its short run time, the movie takes the time to develop characters we like, establish the geography of there apartment building, and build from the naturalistic realism of the opening scenes to some extreme WTF horror by the end. You buy it every step of the way because the first-person camerawork puts you in the scene and everything develops at just the right clip.
I had hesitated to watch [REC] because I have already seen (and enjoyed) its American remake, Quarantine, and I expected the original just to be more of the same, but cheaper looking. Now that I have seen the original version, though, I can say that my concerns were for nought. First, the movie looks great. From the sets, to the film quality, to the workings of the cleverly done special effects, it's all very impressive. If it weren't for everyone speaking Spanish, it would be hard to distinguish this movie from a Hollywood movie in terms of production values.
In terms of being "more of the same," that is sort of true, but only in the sense that Quarantine did an admirable job of recreating this extremely good, extremely cool original movie. There are differences in the hows and whys of what is behind the infection (though both movies are pretty vague and mysterious about this point), but otherwise they follow the same sequence of events, more or less. So there weren't a lot of major surprises for me, but that didn't keep me from being thoroughly engrossed in [REC].
It's impossible not to get sucked into the story - the first-person camerawork puts you in the shoes of a character in the midst of these chaotic, horrific events and there's no escape. Even the subtitles seemed to fade into the background as the movie went on, leaving me to experience the action without the distraction of having to read. Maybe my high school Spanish was coming back to me, or maybe there wasn't a whole lot of dialogue after everybody started running around trying to eat each other, and the Spanish words for "help!" and "run!" and "go!" were all I needed.
Whatever the case may be, my enjoyment of this movie was in no way lessened by it being in Spanish or me having seen the remake. This is an intense, scary, action-packed horror movie that is about as well-executed as you can get. I can't wait to watch part two, which I've heard good things about, and which will be entirely new to me. Bring it on!
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