Take two parts The Conjuring, add one part The Orphanage, season with a few dashes of Hereditary and glaze with The Shining and you’ve cooked up the 2020 Spanish horror flick Don’t Listen. Brimming with well-worn “haunted house,” “paranormal investigator” and “witch’s curse” tropes, this film serves as a heaping helping of horror comfort food, with just enough gore and decay to turn the stomach, thereby making this food metaphor a bit ill-fitting. Nevertheless, the foreboding set design, impressive technical chops and unnerving sound editing give horror fans plenty to savor, even if its derivative as all hell.
The film’s Spanish title literally translates to “Voices,” and that title fits slightly better than Don’t Listen, which hews a bit too closely to Don’t Look Now or Don’t Breathe and also just doesn’t make a lot of sense. After all, those who fall victim to the malicious entity behind the murmuring voices that pervade the sprawling estate at the heart of this film aren’t dying because they listened to the voices. The menacing ghoul is much more assertive than that, taking the form of buzzing housefly and wriggling into ear canals in order to briefly possess its victims for violent ends.
We’re introduced to this insectile possessor early in the film. After a psychologist (Beatriz Arjona) is brought in to examine a nine-year-old Eric (Lucas Blas)―who hears voices in the cavernous manor his parents have bought in order to renovate and flip—the fly crawls into her ear and compels her to purposely drive her car into a tree, gruesomely impaling herself through the face in the process. Of course, the voices tell the boy what’s happened to the psychologist before anyone else knows, and he renders these horrific images in crayon drawings à la The Children of the Corn or any other number of creepy kid movies. The boy not only hears voices telepathically, but also crackling over his walkie-talkie. He believes one of those latter voices to be from his father, even though his dad, Daniel (Rodolfo Sancho), insists he’s never used the handheld device. Pretty soon, the kid is catching glimpses of a dark, bedraggled figure in his bedroom, and is spotting rotten feet poking out from behind curtains. Nothing good can come from this.
One night, Daniel wakes up to once again tend to an obnoxiously squeaky pool gate, only to find his son floating face down in the murky water, a red rubber ball (which hearkens too obviously to the red balloon in It) floating nearby. Traumatized by the sudden death of her child, Eric’s mom, Sara (Belén Fabra), heads off to stay with family, insisting she cannot live in the house another moment, while Daniel points out that he can’t leave because all of their money is invested in this eldritch estate. He brings a paranormal investigator named Germán (Ramón Barea), who has written 10 books on Electronic Voice Phenomena, and the prolific ghost hunter takes a more scientific approach to such disturbances than the Catholicism-entrenched Ed and Lorraine Warren.
Germán brings along his sassy daughter, Ruth (Ana Fernández), and some audio and video recording equipment. Though he’s an expert in auditory phenomena, Germán ends up relying a lot more on infrared cameras to detect heat (evidently, evil ghost witches possess roughly the same body temperature as flesh-and-blood humans). Before long, they’re running into the specter, who looks like a cousin of the crone in The Conjuring and who (like Pennywise the Dancing Clown) can take the form of lost loved ones. More houseflies penetrate ears, violence ensues and it’s all linked back to a witch who was tortured and executed as part of the Spanish Inquisition, which apparently took place in a basement dungeon hundreds of years before.
Available to stream on Netflix, the underseen Don’t Listen is essentially an only slightly mutated clone of any number of similar movies, but the filmmakers seem less interested in telling a unique story than in presenting a familiar one as stylishly as possible. We get some shots straight out of “The Shining, such as the requisite aerial views of a car snaking through woodland highway, or of Daniel hugging the vision of a dead person only for us to see from behind that it’s a rotten witch corpse. There’s also a heavy reliance on an unnerving, droning score that serves as a cheap imitation of Colin Stetson’s unforgettably dread-drenched work on Hereditary.
The CGI, though especially integral in the scenes with the invasive fly, is used deftly and sparingly enough. But as is the case with many other films of this ilk, there are far too many jump scares, and there are stretches during the paranormal investigation sequences that grow tedious, especially when compared with the creepy auditory elements of the film’s opening act. As it unfurls, and becomes less mysterious and more overt, the film loses some of its punch. But overall, Ángel Gómez Hernández’s directorial debut is a slickly produced and moderately entertaining horror trifle. And if that’s not enough for you, his next project, currently in development, is titled The Pope’s Exorcist, which will no doubt end up following Don’t Listen into the depths of Streaming Hell.
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