[REC] (2007) Review

A late-night filler program is following a Barcelona fire crew for a piece about what they do overnight. A call comes in about an old woman trapped in her apartment. The crew arrive, the building is sealed behind them by the health authorities, and nobody outside will explain why.

The 9 is for a film with no fat on it at all. It runs seventy-eight minutes, the camera never leaves the building, and the escalation from routine to catastrophic happens across about twenty minutes without a single moment of exposition.

What almost nothing else in the form manages is a reason for the camera to keep running, and this one has the best available. He is a professional, it is his job, and the reporter keeps telling him to film everything.

The Camera Has a Job

Every found footage film has the same problem, which is why anybody would keep filming, and most of them answer it badly or not at all.

Here the answer is in the premise. Pablo is a television cameraman on assignment, Angela is a reporter who wants the story, and the instruction to keep recording is given out loud, repeatedly, as a professional decision. Later it becomes a light source, then a weapon, and finally the only way of seeing anything at all.

That progression is the film’s cleverest piece of construction. The camera stops being an observer and becomes equipment the characters need to survive, which removes the last reason an audience might ask why it is still on.

Angela’s arc is the other half. She begins performing for an audience, doing pieces to camera with a professional smile, and the film tracks the exact point where the performance stops and she is simply a woman telling somebody to run.

She also keeps working past that point, which is the detail that defines her more than the panic does. Even in the attic she is narrating, describing what she can see, because it is the only thing she knows how to do in a crisis.

The Building Is Sealed

The health authorities quarantine the block with everybody inside, including the fire crew, two police officers, a journalist and a dozen residents who have no idea what is happening. Nobody outside communicates anything.

That silence is the film’s real antagonist for the first half. People shout questions at a plastic sheet and get no answer, a man tries to leave and is threatened, and the residents begin turning on each other because nobody will tell them what the situation is.

It arrived in 2007 and the quarantine material has acquired a second life since. Sealed residents, an authority that will not explain, a health official in a suit who knows more than he is saying, and a building full of frightened people working out who among them is going to be blamed for it.

The apartments themselves are the other resource. Narrow corridors, a central stairwell, a lift shaft, and the film uses the architecture consistently, so the audience always knows where everybody is in relation to everybody else. The building was a real one and the crew shot it as a working space instead of as a set, which is a large part of why the corridors feel as narrow as they do when somebody is running down one of them in the dark.

The residents are also drawn quickly and well. A mother with a sick child, an elderly couple, a Japanese family, a health inspector who is clearly lying. Each gets about ninety seconds and each one is distinct when they matter later.

The sick child is the cruellest piece of setup in it. She has been unwell since the family dog got ill, the mother says so in passing during the calm section, and the audience works out the implication some minutes before anybody in the building does.

The Escalation Is Physical

The first incident is an old woman attacking a police officer. The second is a fireman falling from a stairwell. From there it is continuous.

What separates this from most of the form is that the violence is close, fast and confusing in a way the camera cannot fully capture. People are attacked at the edge of frame, the image swings, and the audience gets fragments.

Balaguero and Plaza shoot it so that the camera is always slightly too late. Something happens, the operator turns, and the thing is either finished or already moving away, which is exactly how a person holding a camera would experience it.

The infected are runners and biters and the film never explains the mechanism during the outbreak itself. There is no scene where a doctor supplies a theory, because nobody in the building has one.

Manuela Velasco was a real television presenter before this, which is why the pieces to camera are so convincing. The professional smile, the way she repositions herself for a better shot, the tone she uses for filler material, all of it is somebody doing a job she had held in real life.

The Penthouse

The last five minutes are two people in a sealed attic apartment that has been abandoned for years, with a tape recorder, newspaper clippings, medical equipment and something living in the dark.

The film switches to night vision, which is the only reason anything is visible, and the green image with two figures moving through it is the most frightening thing the form has produced.

What is in there is the Medeiros girl, and the design is genuinely upsetting, but the sequence works because of the sound instead of the image. Something enormous moving, breathing, and getting closer, while the camera can only see about two metres.

The night vision is also the film denying the audience the thing it has been giving them for seventy minutes. Everything up to this point has been lit, however badly, and the last stretch removes color, removes depth, and leaves a green rectangle in a black room.

The explanation is also delivered here and it is the correct amount. Clippings and a recording establish that this was a containment attempt involving a possessed girl, and the film gives the audience enough to understand and not enough to be comfortable.

What the Remake Lost

Quarantine was made the following year, shot almost identically, and released in America before most people had seen the original.

It is competent and it removes the one thing that made the ending work, which is the religious explanation. The American version makes it a virus, which is a decision that converts an inexplicable horror into a medical problem.

The original’s advantage is that the last five minutes are about something ancient in an attic, which is a different and older kind of fear than contagion. A virus can be cured and whatever is in that room cannot.

The sequels went further into that material and got worse as they went, and the first film remains the one where the explanation is a handful of clippings and a voice on a tape.

It also ran seventy-eight minutes on a small budget with a mostly unknown cast, and its commercial success is the reason a decade of Spanish horror got financed. That is a considerable amount of consequence for one building and one night.

Should you watch [REC]?

Yes, and watch it in the dark with the volume up. Seventy-eight minutes in one building, a cameraman who has a professional reason to keep filming, and a last five minutes in an attic where a night vision lens can see about two metres.

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