El habitante incierto

Spanish movies never disappoints you to give thrills and twists. How it started and ended felt like riding a roller roaster. It's actually quite dark.

The movie evolves with a guy named Felix who is a timid person who lives in large house. He is always scared and thinks someone might be in his house. Once he helped a person who's desperately looking for phone and let him entered into his house. But,the man left the house without sign. Since then Felix is assuming, he might not left his house, he must be hiding somewhere in his house. Gradually, he lost sleep and drives arounds and sleeps in his car. Will he able to get away from from his timidness? Is he hallucinating? Or someone actually living in that house?

As a Horror fan, I was fairly disappointed that (yet again) another film was tagged/labeled as Horror when it simply isn't. I don't know how long it will take before it finally sinks in - a Thriller is not Horror. The difference might be less obvious and more subtle and nuance depended than the difference between Comedy and Drama, but it's there!

However, as a films fan and a literature fan, I was very pleasantly surprised. The Uninvited Guest has one of the best script/ideas I've ever seen. The way the protagonist Felix is haunted by the intruder in his house (or maybe just his paranoid thoughts of one?) and then ends up as such in a similar situation himself is artistic and almost genius.

The acting of the main characters is excellent, Andoni Gracia and Monica Lopez have really given lives to the script. The other characters I believe weren't important enough to director/writer Morales vision, they could have been given a little more depth. No harm done though, and the sensations of confusion, discomfort and bizarre anxiety in the audience weren't negatively affected.

The ending had a very nice (if somewhat predictable) twist, and could be understood in more than one way. All in all, while not exactly frightening or horrific, The Uninvited Guest is a clever, original and innovative film. Recommended!

The same producers , Mar Targarona and Joaquin Padró , who ulteriorly will make ¨The orphanage¨ ¨The Julia's eyes¨ or ¨Los Ojos De Julia¨ , ¨X3pd¨ , and ¨The Body ¨or ¨El Cuerpo¨ bring us another unsettling film , this ¨El Habitante Incierto ¨ or ¨The uncertain guest¨ . The film contains tension , thriller , drama , mystery , plot twists and shocks , including decent scares with tense terror sequences especially in its final part , in a creepy denouement , near of the end . It deals with an architect called Felix (Andoni Gracia) who has just split up with his fiancéé called Claudia (Monica Lopez) and inhabits a big mansion in the great city of Barcelona . Then a stranger into your house to use your telephone , while he has been patiently waiting in the kitchen , he finds out how many hiding places there really are at his home . But are there enough to hide another individual , a rare parasite of living space ? . The premise is the following : whether Felix being stalked by an strange visitor or is Félix really going nutty ? Open the door to your worst nightmare .

This suspenseful movie was produced by the successful Catalan producers Mar Targarona and Joaquin Padró ; it displays relentless thriller , intrigue , Kafkaesque incidents , shocks , hard-edged drama , twisted plot , creepy images and some gore when crimes take place . ¨The uncertain guest¨ is a motion picture that balances precariously over the dark comedy , ¨Psycho¨ Hitchockian intrigue , Michael Haneke's ¨Funny games¨ invasion genre and Michael Powell's ¨Peeping Tom¨ style . Despite its low budget the picture manages to be intelligent , intriguing and thrilling . The good thing about this film is that the directors made it on a shoestring budget only having to do one set , yet the movie works on many levels but is constantly reconfigured . This is an interesting flick as well as a superbly written script delving into the human psyche in such extreme situation . The overall result is chilling proof that filmmaker Guillem Morales can take us back into a house while delivering a completely different scare . Although is sometimes slow moving and stagy , however is entertaining for continuous suspense . The cast is frankly well giving fine performances , though little known actors , such as Andoni Gracia as insane Felix and Monica Lopez as wheel-bounded-chair Vera ; including brief performances from Francesc Garrido and director Agusti Villaronga . Sinister and mysterious atmosphere is finely photographed by cameraman Sergio Bartroli , being filmed on location , mostly interiors , in Valldoreix , Esplugues De Llobregat , Sant Cugat del Vallès , Barcelona , Catalonia, Spain . Suspenseful and stirring musical score by Marc Vaillo.

Spanish fantastic film has been having an incredible renaissance over the past 15 years. From Álex De la Iglesia to Jaime Balaguero to Alejandro Amenábar to Paco Plaza to Nacho Vigalondo, all range of horror, science fiction and fantasy has been pouring out of the country, to be embraced by cinephiles and cult film enthusiasts , and with ¨The uncertain guest¨ by Guillem Morales , the Spanish terror cinema advances more and more . This motion picture relatively cheap was professional and tautly written and directed by Guillem Morales who subsequently realized another hit titled ¨The Julia's eyes¨ also dealing with violent confrontation among two characters . The movie will appeal to suspense enthusiasts and twisted intrigues buffs . It's well worth watching and contains some really eerie scares and disturbing images . This is without a doubt a thought-provoking and thrilling film to be liked for suspense fans , turning out to be one of the most original Spanish movies of the last years . A new international version of 'The Uninvited Guest' is on its way along with remakes of Guillem Morales' Julia's Eyes The Orphanage' from Ja Bayona" and as well as a remake of Oriol Paulo's The Body.

Oh what a film - great story, great actors, great direction! Totally original, unpredictable and captivating, this movie proved to be the film experience of the month. Free of all kinds of clichés, it's a good example of a deep and disturbing old world thriller, which can be horrifying and funny at the same time. Perfectly written and grasping, it draws the viewer into a twisted world which could be surrounding each one us. Without stressing the paranoid aspect or attempting to brainwash the spectator, it manages to create a believably claustrophobic atmosphere and yet offer a very humane look upon loneliness and fear without introducing any evil characters or violent situations. I can't help but applaud the authors of this film and give it the full 10 points.

I like to imagine that money came in for this before the filmmaker had the chance to iron out the creases in the script and he just went ahead while the project was still hot and he could get it made.

It is half-way an interesting film, a more novel take on Hitchcock than we have seen from DePalma in ages; the prowling eye of the camera; the vertigo of assumed identities and deceived points-of-view; the projections in space of an obsessive mind. But a deeply flawed film that left me with a growing sense of dissatisfaction.

Our point-of-view is decidedly with a man who comes to think that someone else is hiding in his own house. The house itself is a spacious labyrinth of modern architecture so it's impossible to make sure; dark corners abound and the mind comes to cast in them its own shadows of doubt. The paranoid situation he's embroiled in becomes worse when he suspects that his ex is involved in some mysterious bargain where he is the victim.

The story has been set in motion long before though. There is a woman who has suffered a crippling accident and whose husband has grown distant from her, we get to find out about this later in the film when he does.

In the first house, physical space is what the mind fills in with its own chimeras. In the second house, it's what the mind fills with emotional pain, with distance as the space between hearts and affections.

It's in this second house that the man seeks refuge - where he comes to fill the space left blank by the missing husband - now by going into hiding himself, and so looking at his situation from the inverse point-of-view. Now we are what we were trying to apprehend in the first half, looking to evade capture from anxious eyes. So if the first house was the setting for a thriller, what was perceived from our end as holding elusive danger, here it's us causing the thriller to happen while from our pov it is recast as this exhilarating game of hide-and-seek. It makes sense to watch this as a dance or performance art; where one partner swings out of view just seconds before the other enters it, with both locked together in a ballet of appearances.

The man obsessively imagines himself as part of a relationship, and the film assumes a whimsical, light-hearted tone. This strangely underscores the fundamental creepiness of what is really going on.

There are two problems in all this. One is that it never makes any sense why our man behaves the way he does. Usually what Hitchcock did was that he would supply the doubt of an unreliable eye or unstable mind; here the guy seems perfectly normal and then acts completely unhinged.

The other is the ending, where the filmmaker stretches to explain for us the missing links of the story. We knew that the two houses were somehow linked, but it turns out that they were quite literally so. So instead of using mirrored space - and persons, there's two of everyone here and one woman seems to be the other's twin sister - as the means of examining abstract reflections, we're give pieces of a puzzle to put together. In doing so, whole swathes of the story collapse and what held elusive power by remaining just out of sight is made to be safely ordinary or, worst, downright stupid.