The renaissance of Spanish horror cinema continues apace with a film that joins the hitherto American-dominated cycle of first-person, faux-reality handheld horror movies. The trend was effectively initiated by The Blair Witch Project and was recently taken into blockbuster territory with Cloverfield. [•REC] is tough to fault as a pure exercise in cinematic dread, though it admittedly suffers from being beaten to UK/US release by two other zombie flicks: Britain’s The Zombie Diaries and George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead, a reboot of his endlessly influential undead series for the YouTube generation.

Despite the very modern technical approach, [•REC] is closest in cynical spirit to Romero’s original, 40-year-old Night of the Living Dead. Claustrophobically containing its outbreak to a single interior location with all exits blocked by sinister, faceless authority figures, its one significant difference is that the zombies are on the inside from the outset. Otherwise, it cannily reworks the story dynamics of Night of the Living Dead as the fraught, gradually depleted characters argue with/blame each other for the unfolding crisis rather than joining forces to boost their survival chances. [•REC] also features a nose-biting, creepy zombie kid sequence to rival the unforgettable matricide interlude in Night.
Intense and pared to a lean running time, [•REC] focuses on the sexy front-woman of a show called While You Sleep, that follows the nightly routines of ordinary Joes we routinely rely on. Accompanying two firemen on their nocturnal rounds, she hopes for juicy dramatics and ratings-friendly fire action (the pic is fashionably satirical of ambulance-chasing modern TV, though doesn’t over-sell it). Responding to a call about an old woman in distress, the cameraman, presenter and firemen head to an apartment block to find the woman unusually aggressive. She represents the beginnings of a highly contagious zombie-like virus – as in 28 Days Later, the ‘z’ word is never mentioned – that spreads rapidly through the building while the nervous powers-that-be enforce a strict quarantine.

Authentic performances and evocative use of sound help sell the movie’s sense of escalating panic. Sometimes breathlessly suspenseful, [•REC], like Cloverfield, captures a dire situation spiralling horribly out of control and exploits the post-9/11 audience’s knowledge of what it’s like to powerlessly watch on TV as mass carnage unfolds. Its efforts to credibly convey the first-person gimmick echoes The Blair Witch Project as, at various points, the camera cuts out, falls over or gets put on the floor to offer a prolonged view of feet.

[•REC] really comes into its own during the final 15-20 minutes. A genuinely terrifying denouement offers a neat homage to The Evil Dead (a plot-explaining reel-to-reel tape recorder), visual quotes from Blair Witch and a suffocating intensity. The heroine and her cameraman venture into a sealed, unoccupied room and learn the origins of the virus, but they’re not alone.

When this already chilling sequence switches to the camera’s night-vision mode, both the audience and the cameraman can see the shuffling grotesque ghoul in the room with the heroine, but she can’t. This scene is truly the stuff of nightmares, expanding on the great climactic night-vision set piece in The Silence of the Lambs and exploiting our ever-present fears of what may be lurking in the dark.

In the continual absence of any original ideas, [•REC] has already been remade for cinemagoers unable to read subtitles in the Hollywood form of Quarantine (due for release at the tail-end of 2008). Be warned that the teaser trailer for this remake actually gives away the final, chilling shot of [•REC]. Steven West (www.horrorview.com)