Sweet Home

 Sweet Home

Rafa Martinez’s locked-house chiller comes from Spain’s best-respected horror stable

The closing credits of Sweet Home — one of those “tell it how it isn’t” titles — reveal that 154 jobs were created by making it, which perhaps compensates somewhat for the multiple fictional lives bloodily lost during it. The credits also mention the Johns Carpenter and McTiernan, as well as other directors to whom debut director Rafa Martinez is clearly in debt in a project which follows high profile projects like the [REC] quartet and While You Were Sleeping out of Spain’s high-profile Filmax stable. Though Home lacks the distinctiveness of those films, it’s still likely to garner significant international sales from markets with an interest in Spanish horror: the film’s prospects are improved by its being in English..

Opening credits make a wobbly attempt to connect the plot to contemporary social issues. Stats are given suggesting that a small percentage of the many questionably legal forced evictions which leave many poor Spaniards homeless each year are carried out by hunky hooded men who, for example sprinkle cockroaches onto elderly tenants’ bath sponges to terrify them before killing them.

The performance of Garcia-Jonsson, who starred in Jaime Rosales’ 2014 Cannes player Beautiful Youth, keeps all the nonsense just about grounded. She’s a credible and exciting Final Girl, combining the right balance of innocence, bravery, wit and energy. Present in practically every scene, Garcia-Jonsson carries the film but is nonetheless subject to more than one leering camera angle as she desperately seeks to save her life. But it’s not easy to spot why she would have fallen for the insipid Bruno in the first place, and there’s little in their exchanges to alter that view. Pro stuntman Oriol Tarrida as the lumbering, hulking, raincoat-wearing “The Liquidator”, a kind of Hispanic update to Kharis, does a nicely charismatic job of his liquidating.

The building is probably the creepiest to be seen in Spanish film since the first [REC], and D.P. Antonio J. Garcia and production designer Sylvia Steinbrecht do it full justice, though the house’s geography is as murky to the viewer as it often is to the characters. García’s camera work is urgent hand-held, at times stomach-turningly so, but at its best it combines with good sound work to give the atmosphere a pulsating, tactile physicality. Gines Carrion Espi’s score in annoying unsubtle: the best musical moments belong to a rendition of Spanish 1973 Eurovision cheesy classic It’s You, by Mocedades, thrown in by Martinez for no apparent reason, but to nicely ironical effect.