In short: Noctem (2017)

Some hacker guy – when your definition of a hacker is “someone who can plug a cell phone into a USB hub” – named Saúl (Diego Ingold) sits alone in a dark office examining the videos on the banged up cells of pretty actor Adrián (Adrián Lastra) and his pretty friend Basty (Esteban Piñero) who both disappeared a year ago while on vacation in Mexico. He has been asked to do so by Adrían’s pretty buddy Álex (Álex González), a mutual friend.

Turns out Adrián had taken to filming most of what was going on around him – there’s the POV horror mandated mumbling about a “documentary” – particularly since his apartment got rather poltergeist-y at night following his acquisition of a mysterious box. A mysterious box which will turn out to be connected to a fallen angel in need of a couple of sacrificial victims, no less. And if you’ve guessed that most of the material we get to see consists of Adrián’s and Basty’s lame cell phone camera footage, have a lollipop.

Even after Adrián has gotten rid of the box, the paranormal activity (sorry) doesn’t stop, so he and ever helpful Basty go on vacation in Mexico in the hopes that’ll calm things down. This will obviously turn out to be a pretty bad idea.

As my imaginary reader knows, I’m not at all a hater of the POV horror formula, but boy, do films like Marcos Cabotá’s Noctem make it difficult to give the form a fair shake. Turns out Paranormal Activity isn’t going to be a better film when you add a trip to Mexico at the end and mainly concentrate on male model type characters who are not gay, no sir, as the film can’t stop to emphasize – to its detriment, because these guys actually being gay would at least add some variation to their non-characters compared to other movies that are more or less the same as this one.

If you’ve seen other films of the style, you’ve seen this one too already: there are exactly the paranormal phenomena you’d expect, with a bit of cult stuff thrown in at the end, lots of running around screeching through woods as well as a dark house – the latter made even more annoying by one character going back into the house after he has already escaped. The characters exclusively act like horror film idiots, running towards every creepy noise even once they must know that’s a horrible idea, and avoiding no opportunity to get isolated from any potential help. I’m usually rather tolerant of this sort of thing, but there’s a difference between people confronted with the irrational acting irrationally and people acting idiotically because the writers couldn’t come up with a decent way to get them where they want them to be.


To be fair, among the bland been there, done that horror (and the “surprise development” that will surprise no one), there is one surprisingly effective sequence hidden away relatively early on that shows Adrián following noises through his – huge – apartment, noises he only slowly realizes come from above. Here, Cabotá makes excellent use of the claustrophobic point of view of the cell phone camera, and the basic fear of inexplicable noises in one’s own home. Too bad the rest of Noctem is so generic.