An interesting horror film which is getting a lot of good reviews, such as by Kim Newman in Empire, though I subscribe more to the views in this BBC review.
It employs the same kind of 'events seen through one camera' perspective of Cloverfield applying them instead to a virus outbreak (more in the style of 28 Days Later than Night of the Living Dead) and to a confined apartment block than a city and then mostly just the main staircase of the building with a few set pieces in different apartments. The film creates a good amount of tension as the annoyingly perky presenter of the show acting as our surrogate suffers a complete breakdown from the moment of the first attack where events are taken completely out of her hands and she can't control how it is being presented anymore.
It seems most of these ‘found footage’ films from Cannibal Holocaust through Blair Witch are about people desperately trying to cling to some objectivity in the hopes that they can keep a kind of barrier between themselves from events but which in the end is always a false kind of protection. Only the film, and sometimes the camera, survives and the final scenes of these films almost mock the characters who were filming and thinking they were afforded some omniscient protection when only the viewing audience is allowed that privilege.
I think my only problem with the film is that it occasionally falls into the trap of 'people screaming at each other for no reason'. However I also recently saw Jaume Balagueró's previous film Darkness on television and that suffers to an even greater extent from people screaming less because of the plot and used more as a cheap way of creating jumps and tension, so I should say that [Rec] does not suffer as much from this problem as that film did (of course Night of the Living Dead is still the greatest example of showing people fighting without resorting to shrill screaming!), but it still resorts to quite hackneyed shock tactics (LOUD BANG!) to generate scares at times.
Though there was one fully earned shock early on that worked extremely well:
Spoiler
After the first attack on one of the two security guards on the third floor of the apartment the reporter and the cameraman go back down to the lobby with the injured guard being held by his companion and one of the two firemen - the other of whom is presumably left upstairs to calm down the old lady who attacked them.
The group reaches the lobby (where the rest of the residents are) and finds they've been sealed into the building, they argue with those outside and then start amongst themselves while the camera reaches the entrance doors, tries to look through them and then turns to look back into the lobby area, showing all the characters and setting up a perfect composition for the fireman left upstairs to come hurtling down the stairwell and hit the floor in the centre of the shot.
The group reaches the lobby (where the rest of the residents are) and finds they've been sealed into the building, they argue with those outside and then start amongst themselves while the camera reaches the entrance doors, tries to look through them and then turns to look back into the lobby area, showing all the characters and setting up a perfect composition for the fireman left upstairs to come hurtling down the stairwell and hit the floor in the centre of the shot.
However I do have issues with reviewers talking about how original the film is. There isn’t anything particularly surprising or original about the film:
Spoiler
see for instance the final section which in quick succession repeats The Evil Dead’s tape recording explaining the cause of the situation, The Grudge’s ‘checking out the attic’ jump scare, The Silence of the Lambs’ night vision scenes and finally a little bit of what seemed to me to be Chris Cunningham’s Rubber Johnny video!
(Of course, the US remake is already in production!)
