The same spooks are content to harass neighbour Walter (Demián Salomón) with more standard ghostly hijinks; moving his bed at night, making all sorts of noises, and generally causing disorder. The poor guy is a nervous wreck (it's never explained why he just doesn't go to a hotel or something), and spends his time at work trying to get a paranormal investigator to go check his house.
He finally succeeds convincing her when he gets footage of a mysterious naked emaciated man wandering around his house; By the time she finally pops up, though, Walter's gone missing.
The most horrifying - or, terrifying, I guess - event is reserved for poor Alicia (Julieta Vallina), whose ten-year-old son digs himself out of his grave after getting rolled over by a bus and props himself, unmoving, at the dinner table. After leaving muddy footprints everywhere. Fuck that noise.
Funes, the policeman in charge of the scene (Maximiliano Ghione) contacts Jano (Norberto Gonzalo), another policeman who seems to have experience with this sort of thing to help out. Jano in turn runs into Dr. Albreck (Elvira Onetto), the paranormal expert from the previous story as she's taking pictures of Walter's house, and brings her up to speed. Recognizing that this sleepy Buenos Aires neighbourhood is somehow turning into some sort of locus of paranormal activity, they bring in a Yankee (George Lewis) and set up shop to try and figure out what the hell is going on, one of them stationed on each house. The ghosts don't take it well at all.
It's a very episodic movie that doesn't ever really cohere into a whole and doesn't end up offering a satisfying narrative - but the individual elements are so well made that it doesn't really matter. It's creepy as hell, tense, cheerfully nasty, and features some beautifully mounted jump scares. A fun time, in other words.
Writer/director Demián Rugna and his crew work wonders with a low budget, offering up some neat ghosts, a fair amount of gore, and some pretty effective framing. The characters aren't very memorable, but the script does a good job of making them sound fairly authentic, and the actors sell their parts pretty well. Some of the scenes feel a bit stretched out - there's a lot of arguing, for example, about what to do about the ambulatory corpse - but other than a few scenes like that the film moves at a fair clip.
There's also a good sense of mystery. Some possible explanations are bandied about, but the entirely fallible experts in this film don't ever clarify anything - there's no apparent motivation, no sense of a plan or rules, no seeming goal to the manifestation. Sometimes ghosts are just evil.
There's also a good sense of mystery. Some possible explanations are bandied about, but the entirely fallible experts in this film don't ever clarify anything - there's no apparent motivation, no sense of a plan or rules, no seeming goal to the manifestation. Sometimes ghosts are just evil.
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