If you've ever had nightmares about a home invasion - here's where they get played out. A family moves into a new home. If you've ever moved you'll know there's something kind of creepy about the movers right away. They're too interested in exploring the house; they follow the family members around too often. They're suspicious. And they should be. That night, the family ends up being terrorized by a gang of violent thugs. What starts as a terrifying but still relatively simple robbery eventually descends into bloodshed, rape and murder as the father is forced to accompany one of the invaders into town to withdraw money from his bank account, while his wife and daughter are left at the house at the mercy of the others.
There's really no character development at all in this. The movie opens with an extremely disorienting scene of an obviously hooded, bound and kidnapped man escaping across a highway desperately looking for help, except that you figure out pretty quickly if you pay attention that this can't be the same man. The first impression given is that you're going to have a flashback movie explaining how the man came to be in this situation, but the only other explanation has to be that this guy and his family are are victims of the same gang. It's mildly disorienting at first, but it's also very obvious that whatever we're seeing at the movie's start isn't directly related to the home invasion that's portrayed. The story moves pretty quickly to the family who are the real focus of the movie. We learn little about them. They seem to be a typical father, mother and daughter. There's no particular reason for them to be targeted - which is probably the most frightening part of the movie. This sort of thing won't happen to very many people (thankfully) but when it does happen, it could literally happen to anyone.
The movie progresses (if that's the right word) from being frightening, to being violent, to being very bloody and graphic and in the end quite horrifying. It's well done. It's a Spanish movie. I watched the version dubbed into English - and even the dubbing was done fairly well. There's not really much to complain about, although I'm not sure that the scene at the beginning was really necessary. It disorients for a few minutes at most, but then it serves no real purpose. (8/10)
