Lawson
Grr. I was really looking forward to this thriller since it has a high IMDb rating and a cool premise: "What if... you let a stranger into your house to use your phone, but while you've been patiently waiting in the kitchen, he just disappears...".For the first half-hour, it looked like the movie was gonna deliver, but then it takes an abrupt turn into Bizarro Land, in which the stalkee in turn starts stalking some paraplegic woman whose husband had disappeared apparently while tunneling under their house to the initial stalkee's house for some reason. WTF. I'm not sure but I don't think everything was fully explained by the end. (I'm not sure because these mindf*ck movies often escape me.)The movie was directed and written by Guillem Morales. I'll buy him as the former but not the latter. The direction was good. There was a lot of suspense, some involving scenes in which the ex-stalkee had to hide in a hurry while avoiding the paraplegic woman in her own home. Not as exciting as having to avoid a psycho killer in one's own home but Morales managed to keep my interest anyway.
lastliberal
In his first feature-length effort, writer/director Guillem Morales has a winner. I almost thought I was watching a Hitchcock thriller brought up to date.Is Felix (Andoni Gracia) crazy? Is it just some aftereffects from losing his sweetheart (Mónica López)? He is definitely hearing things; or he thinks he is, but no one else can find anyone.No problem, he gets a gun and just starts blasting away, sure that he has hit his target. he locks him in the house and breaks into the next door neighbor's house, where a woman in a wheelchair is living.He is quite comfortable using her house and she is clueless as to his presence.The he starts seeing shadows move about her house. maybe he is crazy! The shadows are not what he thinks and he resumes his place only to discover the woman's husband and his big mistake.Spooky, funny, sad, creepy, and the ending is a winner!!!!
galensaysyes
Someone, some day, should do a study of architecture as it figures in horror films; of all those explorations of weirdly laid out mansions, searches for secret passageways and crypts, trackings of monsters through air ducts, and so forth. Offhand I can recall only a few films in which architecture played a major role throughout--"Demon Seed," "Cube," the remake of "Thirteen Ghosts"--but it's at the heart of every story about a spooky house or church or crypt; it's all about the character and the affect of spaces, passages, and walls. So I was looking forward to this thriller where it promised to be central. The idea is this: An architect has built--actually, rebuilt--for himself a huge and rambling house; his wife has just left him, mainly because of his own self-centeredness, but also, it is intimated, because she can't get used to the place since he remodeled it. Living in unaccustomed solitude (real this time, rather than virtual), he comes to suspect that somebody else--a stranger who had come to the door one evening asking to use the phone and then suddenly disappeared--is living into the house with him; only the place is big enough so that he never sees him.This is a good start for a melodrama, whose development one would expect to follow some such lines as these: After searching the house for the intruder a few times without success, the architect resorts to his blueprints to undertake more systematic searches, trying in various ways to surprise, intercept, or ambush the intruder, maybe by means of some special features he built into the structure. Meanwhile the intruder has discovered hiding places and back ways between places that the architect didn't foresee or doesn't remember. The movie would turn into a cat-and-mouse game, a hunt, a battle; and finally, in trying to trap the intruder, the architect himself would end up trapped in his own creation, in some way he didn't expect. Then he would be forced to think himself out of it--and maybe at the same time out of his own self-imposed isolation--and in a final twist would nail, and maybe even kill, the ****er.Nothing like this happens in this movie; the house is just a house, the architect is just a guy, and his nemesis is of an unknown character, if he exists at all. Here is what does happen in the movie: Once the intruder is installed in the house--if he is--the architect begins hearing noises, but when he goes to investigate finds nothing. He calls the police, they think he's slightly nuts; he persuades his estranged wife to spend the night, she thinks he's more nuts. At last, more or less accidentally, he runs into the intruder (doesn't get a good look, but figures, who else could it be?--not a hard question, in a story with, to that point, fewer than three principal characters), whereupon he locks the doors, lowers the grills on the windows, throws away the key (I don't know why he thought this necessary), and leaves his victim to starve. I missed why this was a given: the doors and walls are made of steel? In any event, the architect takes to sleeping in his car. And since the idea of the movie has languished undeveloped and cannot now be developed further, something else must be devised to take its place. And this is it: The architect--are you ready?--moves into the house of the man who (presumably) moved into his, and lives there in the same way. How is this possible? It is not, but the movie takes this route to try and make it seem so: The architect has drawn a picture of the man who came to his door; and when he leaves the house he takes the picture with him; and while sitting in his car, he throws the picture into the street; and two kids pick it up and observe that it looks like Martin, their neighbor; whereupon the architect asks where his house is and the kids point the way.If this sequence seems to verge on the implausible, what ensues plunges right in. The architect takes up residence with Martin's wheelchair-ridden wife, unbeknownst to her; so stealthy in his moves and so cunning in his reading of his hostess that he's able always to leave a room just as she enters or to duck out of sight just as she turns around. Throughout this section the movie is clever in one way, making (or leaving it to the viewer to make) the point that his life with this stranger, who doesn't know he's there, is in essence the same life he lived with his wife, as a virtual recluse with her as a convenient buffer. But at the same time, his inability to live in the world makes his transformation into Raffles the cat-burglar entirely incredible. Not to go into the series of twists at the end--including another murder achieved by locking someone in behind another invincible door--this one in front of a landing so flimsy that it collapses under the weight of a wheelchair; two nice people who take murder in stride; and (before the story started) the unnoticed construction of a tunnel under several houses.... To the final, long-anticipated twist, the movie adds another, to make it even more offensive, and then...ends.Here is a story that depends on the development of two things--the idea of the stranger in the house, and the character of the man whose house it is--and fumbles both. The first fumble makes it boring; the second made me angry, as it pushed its main character farther and farther along a more and more zigzaggy path, and never offered any explanation for the character who most required one: Martin the tunnel-builder and sneak-tenant. The story should be redone by someone, some day.
kosmasp
In Germany this movie is called, Uncertain Guest, but Uninvited Guest might be the more appropriate title. I watched this movie at the annual Fantasy Filmfest in the city Stuttgart. I didn't know what to expect, else then a thriller. After a slow beginning this movie gets in gear. And if you're with it for the ride, you'll get rewarded with a really great story/movie. There's only one thing you have to cope with, is that halfway through it'll change lanes ... The movie heads the same direction, but with a slightly different premise ... You'll understand once you watched it! ;o) This change is necessary, because the movie would have become boring. The pace is going down a little during this change, but after that it accelerates again and will have you on your toes for the rest of the time. And it is the second part of the movie, that has one of the most chilling scenes (at least it had that affect to me, because it created images and thoughts in my head that weren't funny at all) I have seen in the last few years! But be warned, this movie might leave you with more questions than answers. It might, so if you're not afraid of that, try it out and have fun! :o)
