Nightworld (2017)

Former LA cop Brett (Jason London) has great difficulty working through the death of his Bulgarian wife Ana (Diana Lyubenova), spending his time at their Bulgarian country home in a deep depression. A concerned buddy has a plan to get him out and back into the world, to which end the proactive man has procured a security job in Sofia for Brett.

It’s a live-in position in an old villa whose upper levels have been converted into apartments, or so the owners of the place say. Not that Brett’s ever seeing anyone living there. It’s a cushy, if somewhat strange job: Brett’s only duties are locking and unlocking the main door and to descend into the very deep cellar twice a day to check some security monitors that are facing the darkness inside a large locked chamber (the film calls it a hangar, for some reason) that’s situated behind a large door with neat skulls and tentacles on it. Clearly, there’s nothing to worry about here, and at first, Brett actually seems to get better doing very little. He’s got a new environment to explore, he’s got at least something to occupy himself with, and the – very young and very very pretty – barista Zara (Lorina Kamburova) of the corner coffee shop clearly has an eye on him. Therea are certainly worse ways to live.

However, there’s something really strange going on in the villa. There are not just the expected peculiar noises, and that hell gate style door in the cellar, but Brett also begins to have nightmares that begin to turn into daytime visions. And once Brett has seen what looks a lot like footprints through one of his cameras and calls in the owners’ expert for this situation, an older blind man named Jacob (Robert Englund) events spiral downwards rather quickly.

For my tastes, Patricio Valladares’s Nightworld is a pleasant surprise, a horror film that feels very much beholden to the classic Weird Tales style of horror with a smidgen of Lucio Fulci I’m not going to spoil. It is, in other worlds, exactly the sort of film where I’m perfectly willing to overlook certain weaknesses as long as it understands and uses its strengths.

The obvious weakness here is the pacing; while this sort of mood based horror does need and deserve a thoughtful pace, Nightworld does meander a bit in the middle, with perhaps one dream sequence and ten minutes of running time that could productively have been excised. It’s not a deadly flaw, at least in my eyes, mind you, though it is something which will make the film not terribly interesting to watch for some viewers. The film’s not always all that believable, either: would a guy like Brett really take a job like this without at least explicitly asking if he’s guarding anything illegal and without any explanation for its strangeness? The May-October romance between Brett and Zara isn’t terribly easy to buy either.


However, while acknowledging these flaws, I can’t say they really did anything to my enjoyment of the film. Valladares – ably assisted by some cracking spooky locations and Pau Mirabet’s moody and shadowy camera work – creates a wonderful sense of creeping wrongness. And once the film has explained the rather wonderful backstory of the villa through some patented and effective Englund exposition, it also develops a neat and effective resonance with classical myths about the realms of the dead, all the while making good use of its budget (the way the film uses a large, dark empty room to full effect borders on brilliance) and evoking its lead’s pining for a lost love to thematically appropriate effect. In general, Valladares uses iconic horror images very well, with moments like the shots of the faces of the dead trapped in the villa pressed against its windows from the inside just resonating very well with me in their archetypal feel.