32 Malasana Street (Malasaña 32)

 The Olmedo family moves to Madrid from the impoverished countryside, tying what little money they have into an unforgiving mortgage for a fully-furnished apartment.
 Among the furnishings, but not in the brochure: the ghost of the previous resident.

 While the parents (Beatriz Segura and Iván Marcos) go off to their jobs, teenaged sons Amparo and Pepe (Begoña Vargas and Sergio Castellanos) are left to look for jobs and care for an infirm grandfather (José Luis de Madariaga) and tiny five-year-old Rafita (Iván Renedo).

 Of course the ghost takes an interest in little Rafita. She abducts him early on, setting off a chain of events that will eventually pit the whole family against the supernatural. 
 Beyond a couple of really questionable choices and a pervading gerontophobia, the film doesn't really do a lot to distinguish itself. There are some interesting themes about Spanish societal intolerance and conservatism - there's a reason this is set in 1976, with the non-literal specter of Franco still haunting the proceeds; The script does try to weave both its ghost and the family's predicament into them, but to be honest those attempts, or any other story considerations, are drowned out by the film's seeming primary mission to deliver a near-constant barrage of jump scares and horror clichés.
 In other words, it's more interested in behaving like a trashy, mid-tier Blumhouse production.

 

 The jump scares come frequently and cheap, punctuating pretty much every scene and starting right at the prologue. There's fake-outs, ghostly irruptions, orchestral stings, even an angry cat at one point; seriously, no cliché goes unused. They completely crowd out the cooler, quieter conceits (I liked a part where Amparo sees the ghost using a tinted window) and some clever setups.

 This sort of thing can work, but not without a lot more care and craft. As presented here it feels forced and lacks the wit or originality of its more obvious inspirations.
 Instead we get a haunted etch-a-sketch and a mind-bogglingly terrible scene where the ghost addresses Rafita via a TV puppet show with a silly panto voice. No idea if that's some sort of Spanish cultural trauma (in the same way 70's Eastern European animation shorts were for me) but holy shit it seems like a miscalculation. That's where the movie completely lost me.

 As for questionable choices: there's a twist to the ghost story that, given the themes, I think is well-intentioned, but still feels a bit tropey and off. More problematic is the film's use of a paraplegic woman as a possible magical solution to the family's problem. To add insult to injury, it's explained that her mental issues mean that ghosts can easily take over because there's not a lot going on there. Fuck your inner life, lady!

 It's a handsome movie, with some beautiful photography (DP: Daniel Sosa), good acting, and some great staging. The problem is that there's not a lot there beyond a cavalcade of clichés and those iffy twists. I can't really say that director Albert Pintó makes the wrong call by filling it to the brim with cheap shots; Might as well try to scare the few teens that haven't seen this sort of thing a dozen times over, right?