Coming from the same people that conjured up [REC] and While You Were Sleeping, Spanish Horror Sweet Home fails to pack the same sort of punch as its predecessors in this lacklustre effort.
Sweet Home opens with some stats about Spanish home evictions and the questionable legal methods followed by a quick scene to bring the point home. We then meet Alicia (Ingrid Garcia-Jonsson), a young real estate agent visiting Ramon, an elderly man looking to sell his dank and dingy apartment. While there, for some strange reason, Alicia thinks it romantic to bring her boyfriend, Simon (Bruno Sevilla), who’s just a real soggy blanket, to one of the empty apartments for the evening for his birthday. While there, danger lurks just around the corner as three hooded men turn up to kill Ramon, leaving Alicia and Simon trapped inside the building fending for their lives.
If you look on the official IMDb page for Sweet Home it reveals the film has been banned. The only way I can see that this film has been banned is that the Spanish authorities don’t like the message it sends out one bit because there’s nothing about this film, no bite whatsoever, that justifies it being banned. It’s more likely just a bit of a marketing gimmick to gain some much needed attention for the film which is unlikely to do very well overseas. The choice to have the film in English rather than Spanish with subtitles may just help it that extra bit and, really, Sweet Home could use all the extra help it can get.
When you realise what great horrors 2015 has given us, it’s hard to take a film like Sweet Home seriously, to talk about it in the same vein as a horror title. Where the likes of It Follows and We Are Still Here feel as if they were made with passion for the genre by real fans, Sweet Home feels thrown together with a bland script and a bad score that overplays and oversells. Director Rafa Martinez has tried to create a tension in the film, using a single location unfolding over the space of only a couple of hours and it’s a nice attempt but just falls short in execution. The set design is probably its strongest area, but it’s in a constant battle with the score – the weakest – and it often grates on you, playing out more like a bad TV movie rather than one for the big screen.
Horror is such a hard genre to get right and that’s part of the reason why it’s struggling so much in modern times, but with films like Sweet Home slapping the horror label like it stands in that league, it’s hardly surprising.
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