Horrorfest 2013: Sleep Tight

What the hell, let's do 2 Spanish films about apartment buildings in a row! Only this one's much darker than the last, and not funny at all. But, this is Horrorfest, right? Dark's the name of the game.

2011's SLEEP TIGHT stars Luis Tosar as an apartment concierge who delights in psychologically torturing the tenants in his care, without them knowing what he's doing. Well, maybe the word "delight" isn't right, since it's clear Tosar is not happy at all and can't seem to find joy or happiness in anything. He's a lonely man who only has his bed-ridden mother to talk to. Still, his main hobby is making everyone else around him miserable without letting them catch on.

We learn early on that one of his unknowing victims is a young, beautiful tenant (Marta Etura) who Tosar drugs nightly and sleeps with, leaving in the morning before she wakes up. No matter what he does, she remains optimistic -- when she develops a mysterious rash, she's cool with it. When roaches infest her apartment, she's still cool. All of this is perpetrated by Tosar, and the more she seems to stay happy, the more it becomes his central mission in life to eventually break her.

So, Tosar goes to creepier and creepier lengths to make her life hell, and this is what makes up the bulk of the movie. There's also a suspicious boyfriend who shows up (Alberta San Juan) and a little girl who thinks she knows what's going on and is bribing Tosar (Iris Almeida).

This is definitely a creepy premise, and there are some horrific scenes, but a lot of the scares come from scenes in which Tosar has gone to great lengths to pull off his evil schemes on his victim only to get so far in over his head that he almost gets caught. This puts us in the old position Hitchcock used to love to exploit, where we're rooting for the villain to get away with his dastardly deeds, even though, rationally, we'd never want that to happen in real life. That's an interesting dichotomy -- we're simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the voyeurism aspect, able to identify enough with the villain to get nervous when he's almost caught, but not so much that we don't cringe in horror when he's about to do his deeds.

This flick was directed by Jaume Balaguero, who made the found-footage flick [REC] from a previous Horrorfest, and as good as [REC] is, this one's even better.