Spain - what a great country! It gave us Julio Medem, it gave us Alejandro Amenabar, and now there's Jaume Balaguero, the man who brought us Darkness, a horror film that's clever, fresh & intriguing. An american family (Iain Glen & Lena Olin) with a teenage daughter (Anna Paquin) & a little boy (Stepnah Enquist) moves into an old house somewhere in Spain, and soon enough find out that there's something wrong with it. There are ghosts of children, supposedly murdered in this very house, there's a strange man walking around the house watching it silently, the little boy is afraid of the dark & wakes up with bruises on his body & the father, who A) has a dark secret in his past, which is somehow connected to the house & B) is not very well in the mental department, starts going a little bit crazy. Sure, it all sounds corny enough, and every person who've seen films like The Sixth Sense, A Stir Of Echoes and The Shining can smile his way through the first half of the film thinking he's seen it all already. But Balaguero has more tricks up his sleeve then just a collection of genre cliches. In fact, he enjoys playing with these cliches, because later things turn not quite the way you were dead sure they would, and the final act has even more surprises in stock. The film is genuinly scary, especially in the second half when the tension just won't let up. The visuals are good - a couple of scenes are pretty likely to haunt you days, maybe even months after watching the film. The final verdict: definitely worth seeing, maybe even more than once. I haven't received that much pleasure from a horror film in quite a while
P.S. And please, people, stop comparing it to The Others, the two films have very little in common except for the set-up (children in a haunted house)
