Fantasia Dispatch 2 - La Habitación del Niño Review

Here is a personal story.  When our son was born, we got a special baby monitor with a motion sensor pad you placed under the crib mattress.  If the baby stopped moving for a certain period of time, the monitor would sound the alarm to the parents in the next room that perhaps the baby stopped breathing.  Of course the thing did not work so well, or we did not fully know how to place it and it would go off occasionally.  Hearing the alarm in the middle of the night would of course cause a mild heart attack to myself and my wife.  And if the baby had stopped moving, other than some really basic and fumbling CPR, what could we really do about it.  This little ‘security’ device actually only worked if nothing happened, it was the falsest of false securities because I do not believe there was much we could do in what it could detect.  The brand name of this system was called the ‘Angel Monitor’ but really it was the devils work.  Of course we just chucked it away lest we go out of our minds every time we had a false alarm!

Back to the film at hand, where Juan takes a slightly different to similar circumstances.  After hearing strange noises coming from the baby’s room through the (conventional) monitor, be buys top of the line Infrared wireless video monitor that allows him and Sonia to see their little angel in that creepy green on black ‘night-vision’ aesthetic that makes the retinas on his eyes glow.  This looks double-creepy on the infant.  But that is OK to the boys parents because of, you know, the added security, right?  Well, not quite.  The next night Juan sees a man in the baby’s room hovering over his child.  He rushes into the room but nobody is there.  The police are called, but nothing was stolen, and nothing disturbed except Juan and Sonia’s peace of mind.  Because this is an Álex de la Iglesia film there is humour in the cop explaining the situation to the beleaguered parents.  He emphasizes just how often houses are broken into, just how good the criminals are these days and just how many kidnappings there are before bidding them good-day and heading back to the office.  Needless to say, a high-tech security system is installed in the house to prevent further unwanted entries. 

The Baby’s room a tale of self-inflicted paranoia, brought on by guilt and lack of parenting experience, fear for your defenseless child and the foolish belief that a security war of attrition is going to make things any better.  That is a heck of a lot smarter than your average ghost story.  While the man gets back in the room (accompanied by the infants strange laughter) again the next night, he has only been seen by Juan (not Sonia) and has not actually done anything harmful.  Yet.  Jaun has been startled enough to begin patrolling the house at night with the baby monitor camera and a large kitchen knife.  At this point Sonia does the sensible thing and takes the baby to her Mom’s house to leave Juan ("You’re not the man I married!") to stew in his own sweat.  The plot thickens as Juan (foolishly staying behind, but hey the man of the house has to protect the investment!) purchases a dozen of those baby monitors and sets up surveillance throughout the house to figure out the other world that lies beneath. 

At about the halfway mark a character brings up the old quantum mechanics thought experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat.  For those not inclined towards physics or mathematics, the experiment goes as follows:  A cat is trapped in a box with a likely fatal radiation source.  While nobody is looking, the probability that the radiation is fatal allows for the cat to exist in multiple states.  Namely, it is alive and dead simultaneously.  That is until someone comes along and actually looks in the box, then the state is ‘decided’ to something resembling conventional reality.  Only at that point it is the cat truly alive or dead.  To simplify things:  looking for things probably influence and effect what you actually find.

The whole quantum physics angle is merely icing on the cake (even if it is surprising that nobody has ever thought of this in the context of a haunting to the best my knowledge).  Álex de la Iglesia and his usual co-writer Jorge Guerricaechevarría have pulled out all the thematic stops to give a classic entry into the ghost-house genre and they deliver a film with oodles more depth than one typically finds in this type of film.  Equal in class and handsome production design to The Orphanage (El Orfanato) and actually predating that film by airing on Spanish TV in 2006), it is also set apart by the more familiar elements of a de la Iglesia flick; the trademark humour permeates the proceedings without ever trifling the story or dumbing things down.  This makes it doubly tragic that it will likely be ignored in North America (well it actually already has been for two years).  This is unfortunately the case for most of Álex de la Iglesia‘s body of work. 

Tales to Keep You Awake (Películas para no dormir) was Spain’s answer to Showtime’s Master of Horror series, in which a number of respected directors were given a budget and a run time and a carte blanche to make their own horror film.  From what I’ve seen (and this includes another real-estate themed horror-suspense picture called To Let), Tales to Keep You Awake easily trumps its American counterpart, and The Baby’s Room is a real gem.  This is no mere tele-movie, but something that should have been given the same treatment on this side of the pond as the films directed or produced by Guillermo del Toro. 

Related Links

• Fantasia Dispatch 1 - The Capsule Reviews
• Swarez's Review (Which also happens to be the Fantasia Catalogue Entry)