(A.k.a. LA CASA DEL FIN DE LOS TIEMPOS)
We start in 1981, and an old house in Venezuela where housewife Dulce (Ruddy Rodriguez) is party to a haunting that leaves her husband dead and her son missing. With her fingerprints found on the knife that killed her spouse, she is blamed for his murder and the son's disappearance. Her punishment is thirty years in prison.
Fast-forward three decades, and Dulce is released from jail. But there's a condition: she is to return to the home where those traumatic events occurred many moons before. Not only that, but she is to be placed under house arrest - complete with armed guards permanently placed at the house's front door.
As Dulce re-enters her home for the first time in thirty years, the old building looks to have been untouched in the interim. It remains dark, dingy and with covers over the aged furniture. In no time at all, memories of the apparitions that haunted her back in the day come flooding back.
Still convinced after all this time that an evil spirit lurks inside the house and was responsible both for her husband's death and her son's abduction, Dulce vows to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Her first port of call is a psychic who proves to be disappointingly ineffectual. More useful is local priest Rodrigo (Hector Mercado). He visits her initially to proffer kindness, but almost instantly becomes intrigued in her claims that it was "the house" that took her family from her.
Together, Dulce and Rodrigo begin to piece fragments from her past with ghostly happenings of the present, in a bid to unravel the mystery once and for all.
THE HOUSE AT THE END OF TIME comes from writer-director Alejandro Hidalgo. It's his first credit on The Internet Movie Database. It certainly feels like a debut feature.
While it's undeniably polished in its visual delivery, slickly edited and tightly controlled in terms of its twisting story and flirting between two different timelines, Hidalgo's film does suffer from subscribing to conventions a little too much. To go with its Spanish language soundtrack, the whole delivery - from the prologue onwards - is almost painstakingly true to the style of modern Spanish genre fare such as THE OPRHANAGE, PAINLESS, JULIA'S EYES and so on.
All very good films in their own right, of course. But Spanish (or Spanish-language) horror films are fast running the risk of going down the same route that J-Horror did in the first few years of the 21st Century: cannibalising each other to the point of becoming tediously predictable.
Hence, THE HOUSE AT THE END OF THE TIME is a handsomely mounted, generously produced thriller with a plot designed to keep the audience guessing right up until the final frame ... and yet, it all feels very familiar in its Gothic photography, washed-out colour correction and austere thrills. Even the performances are typically proficient in that "borderline TV quality" style that the Spaniards have mastered of late.
Taken in isolation, Hidalgo's film is a well-oiled mystery that plays with linear storytelling traditions and always looks impressive. But there's an undeniable predictability to events, and a sense of déjà vu which at different times recalls THE AMITYVILLE HORROR or A TALE OF TWO SISTERS, along with those Spanish titles already mentioned.
Oh, and the aging make-up used on Rodriguez is laughable. Utterly laughable.
THE HOUSE AT THE END OF TIME comes to UK DVD via Matchbox Films.
Picture-wise, it looks great. Presented uncut and in its original 2.35:1 aspect ratio, the transfer is 16x9 enhanced. Colours are accurate, as are flesh tones; the film's very considered élan is adhered to, while blacks are thankfully free from crush. Filmic, sharp and clean throughout, this is an extremely healthy-looking presentation.
Spanish audio comes in a satisfying 2.0 mix, while English subtitles are well-written and easy to read at all times.
The disc opens to a static main menu page. From there, a scene selection menu allows access to the film via 9 chapters.
Only one bonus feature graces the disc: the film's original 2-minute trailer, which does a fair job of conveying the film's visual style ad twisting nature.
Alejandro Hidalgo's film is stylish, beautifully shot and filled with plot twists. It does intrigue and is certainly worth a look. But I do feel like it plays it too safe, falling into expected convention and ultimately emerging as an "also-ran" in the pantheon of latter-day Spanish-language genre films.
Review by Stuart Willis
Released by Matchbox Film |
Region 2 |
Rated 18 |
Extras : |
see main review |