[REC]

By Colin Odell and Michelle Le Blanc

(10/04/08) - Handheld horror. Lazy film-making from people who can't do cinematography or a response to the ubiquity of home video to immerse the audience in a language they understand from personal experience? In many ways the jury's still out, after all the most famous example, the innovative Blair Witch Project, was a scary as You've Been Framed. Years on and the legacy of viral-marketed Blair Witch is upon us again with the also internet hyped Cloverfield and George A Romero's media age left-field Diary of the Dead.

And then we have [REC], in a case of cinema synergy the third handheld horror to be released on UK screens in as many months. Surely enough of this frequently nausea inducing through motion sickness cinema? In the case of [REC] the answer would be a resounding "no" as this is quite simply one of the most effective and terrifying horror films in recent memory and a further example in the recent spate of superb Spanish language horrors.

It all starts off innocently enough when Angela (Manuela Velasco), an upcoming reporter on local television's While You're Asleep, accompanied by assistants/cameramen Manu (Ferran Terraza) and Alex (David Vert) follow one night in the life of the city firemen. A routine call to rescue an old lady who is trapped in a small apartment appears to be the only excitement the team will get all night but how wrong that turns out to be. The team witness some grisly goings on and, like the other residents, they panic and try to leave the building... only to find they have been sealed off by the ever increasing army of police that have gathered around the building. Given no explanation from the authorities and with increasing incidents of horrific violence around them Angela decides to do the only thing she can: keep filming and tell the outside world the truth of what is happening and the way the government has treated its citizens.

A full catalogue of horror tropes, nay some would say cliches, is on show in [REC]: isolated in a building, spooky noises, woman in peril, spooky kid, flesh eating, sudden jumps and so on. There are more than a few nods to recent Asian horror films, a sprinkling of Right At Your Door and a big dollop of Night of the Living Dead. And yet it's the way that [REC] takes the familiar and makes it wholly its own that really makes it something special. In many ways it is the "third way" approach to horror - recent films in the genre have tended to split into two camps, the Ring/Sixth Sense approach to more hands-off psychologically disturbing horror and the Hostel/Saw painography approach to wallow in pain and gore. [REC] has all the tension and psychological horror of the former but doesn't balk on the physicality when necessary.

The hand-held approach means that the nastiness happens "before our very eyes" but because the characters filming it are frequently in peril these moments are not lingered upon. The way the film balances scenes of immense tension with sudden, often unexpectedly abrupt jumps of violence creates a real edge-of-the-seat experience. The camera's almost constant (save for the inevitable "put the camera down and watch impassive moments") first-person perspective really draws the audience into the events, the direct-to-camera address by Angela, with her comments after the scenes of her reporting being delivered to the cameraman (and hence you) immerse you in this claustrophobic world. The detail that she has self-belief in her abilities as a journalist but is still obviously working her way through fairly low-key television gives her a sense of vulnerability amidst the bravura of her frequently bombastic reporting style.

The contrast to the aforementioned Blair Witch Project ("kids get lost and die") could not be more profound, although [REC] is liberal in its homage the story unfolds piece by piece, revealing twists that take the viewer towards further mysteries. Like The Thing there is a sense of mutation, evolution and escalation to the horrors the protagonists face and also a similar distrust of people who have been out of sight even for a moment. [REC] further piles on the tensions and suspicions by having long standing neighbourly disputes spill out into unfounded accusations of responsibility, particularly towards an immigrant family who live in the building that prompts previously masked racist views to boil at the surface. Like its heroine the film has a left-field outlook that challenges the roles of government and individuals in a time of crisis. Like Diary of the Dead, it also looks at the way emerging technologies can democratise people under the yoke of a censorious media - but also how these can be distorted.

Utterly terrifying to the bitter end [REC] is a taut (80 minutes), pacey, exciting and nail-bitingly tense journey into a microcosm of Hell. Frequently horrific, never gratuitous, this is a further example of the growing confidence of Spanish language horror and the sheer diversity and quality of it.

[REC] is released in the UK tomorrow, 11 April.