User reviews

Is it possible to live in somebody's house hiding all the time and avoid that the inhabitants there detect your presence? Well, that's the question this original story deals with. "El habitante incierto" keeps the audience on the alert, 'cause you don't really know what's going on. That plot remind me of Ki-Duk Kim's "Bin Jip" (but that's the only point in common between these two movies).

The movie has a good script, though some dialogs are rather affected and there are a couple of characters that are not well defined. Anyway, the film as a whole really thrilling and brilliant, and the actors are quite reliable (specially Mónica López who plays two different roles).

In short: a nice choice.

*My rate: 7/10

The same producers , Mar Targarona and Joaquin Padró , who ulteriorly will make ¨The orphanage¨ ¨The Julia's eyes¨ or ¨Los Ojos De Julia¨ , ¨X3pd¨ , and ¨The Body ¨or ¨El Cuerpo¨ bring us another unsettling film , this ¨El Habitante Incierto ¨ or ¨The uncertain guest¨ . The film contains tension , thriller , drama , mystery , plot twists and shocks , including decent scares with tense terror sequences especially in its final part , in a creepy denouement , near of the end . It deals with an architect called Felix (Andoni Gracia) who has just split up with his fiancéé called Claudia (Monica Lopez) and inhabits a big mansion in the great city of Barcelona . Then a stranger into your house to use your telephone , while he has been patiently waiting in the kitchen , he finds out how many hiding places there really are at his home . But are there enough to hide another individual , a rare parasite of living space ? . The premise is the following : whether Felix being stalked by an strange visitor or is Félix really going nutty ? Open the door to your worst nightmare .

This suspenseful movie was produced by the successful Catalan producers Mar Targarona and Joaquin Padró ; it displays relentless thriller , intrigue , Kafkaesque incidents , shocks , hard-edged drama , twisted plot , creepy images and some gore when crimes take place . ¨The uncertain guest¨ is a motion picture that balances precariously over the dark comedy , ¨Psycho¨ Hitchockian intrigue , Michael Haneke's ¨Funny games¨ invasion genre and Michael Powell's ¨Peeping Tom¨ style . Despite its low budget the picture manages to be intelligent , intriguing and thrilling . The good thing about this film is that the directors made it on a shoestring budget only having to do one set , yet the movie works on many levels but is constantly reconfigured . This is an interesting flick as well as a superbly written script delving into the human psyche in such extreme situation . The overall result is chilling proof that filmmaker Guillem Morales can take us back into a house while delivering a completely different scare . Although is sometimes slow moving and stagy , however is entertaining for continuous suspense . The cast is frankly well giving fine performances , though little known actors , such as Andoni Gracia as insane Felix and Monica Lopez as wheel-bounded-chair Vera ; including brief performances from Francesc Garrido and director Agusti Villaronga . Sinister and mysterious atmosphere is finely photographed by cameraman Sergio Bartroli , being filmed on location , mostly interiors , in Valldoreix , Esplugues De Llobregat , Sant Cugat del Vallès , Barcelona , Catalonia, Spain . Suspenseful and stirring musical score by Marc Vaillo.

Spanish fantastic film has been having an incredible renaissance over the past 15 years. From Álex De la Iglesia to Jaime Balaguero to Alejandro Amenábar to Paco Plaza to Nacho Vigalondo, all range of horror, science fiction and fantasy has been pouring out of the country, to be embraced by cinephiles and cult film enthusiasts , and with ¨The uncertain guest¨ by Guillem Morales , the Spanish terror cinema advances more and more . This motion picture relatively cheap was professional and tautly written and directed by Guillem Morales who subsequently realized another hit titled ¨The Julia's eyes¨ also dealing with violent confrontation among two characters . The movie will appeal to suspense enthusiasts and twisted intrigues buffs . It's well worth watching and contains some really eerie scares and disturbing images . This is without a doubt a thought-provoking and thrilling film to be liked for suspense fans , turning out to be one of the most original Spanish movies of the last years . A new international version of 'The Uninvited Guest' is on its way along with remakes of Guillem Morales' Julia's Eyes The Orphanage' from Ja Bayona" and as well as a remake of Oriol Paulo's The Body.

Spanish movies never disappoints you to give thrills and twists. How it started and ended felt like riding a roller roaster. It's actually quite dark.

The movie evolves with a guy named Felix who is a timid person who lives in large house. He is always scared and thinks someone might be in his house. Once he helped a person who's desperately looking for phone and let him entered into his house. But,the man left the house without sign. Since then Felix is assuming, he might not left his house, he must be hiding somewhere in his house. Gradually, he lost sleep and drives arounds and sleeps in his car. Will he able to get away from from his timidness? Is he hallucinating? Or someone actually living in that house?

I like to imagine that money came in for this before the filmmaker had the chance to iron out the creases in the script and he just went ahead while the project was still hot and he could get it made.

It is half-way an interesting film, a more novel take on Hitchcock than we have seen from DePalma in ages; the prowling eye of the camera; the vertigo of assumed identities and deceived points-of-view; the projections in space of an obsessive mind. But a deeply flawed film that left me with a growing sense of dissatisfaction.

Our point-of-view is decidedly with a man who comes to think that someone else is hiding in his own house. The house itself is a spacious labyrinth of modern architecture so it's impossible to make sure; dark corners abound and the mind comes to cast in them its own shadows of doubt. The paranoid situation he's embroiled in becomes worse when he suspects that his ex is involved in some mysterious bargain where he is the victim.

The story has been set in motion long before though. There is a woman who has suffered a crippling accident and whose husband has grown distant from her, we get to find out about this later in the film when he does.

In the first house, physical space is what the mind fills in with its own chimeras. In the second house, it's what the mind fills with emotional pain, with distance as the space between hearts and affections.

It's in this second house that the man seeks refuge - where he comes to fill the space left blank by the missing husband - now by going into hiding himself, and so looking at his situation from the inverse point-of-view. Now we are what we were trying to apprehend in the first half, looking to evade capture from anxious eyes. So if the first house was the setting for a thriller, what was perceived from our end as holding elusive danger, here it's us causing the thriller to happen while from our pov it is recast as this exhilarating game of hide-and-seek. It makes sense to watch this as a dance or performance art; where one partner swings out of view just seconds before the other enters it, with both locked together in a ballet of appearances.

The man obsessively imagines himself as part of a relationship, and the film assumes a whimsical, light-hearted tone. This strangely underscores the fundamental creepiness of what is really going on.

There are two problems in all this. One is that it never makes any sense why our man behaves the way he does. Usually what Hitchcock did was that he would supply the doubt of an unreliable eye or unstable mind; here the guy seems perfectly normal and then acts completely unhinged.

The other is the ending, where the filmmaker stretches to explain for us the missing links of the story. We knew that the two houses were somehow linked, but it turns out that they were quite literally so. So instead of using mirrored space - and persons, there's two of everyone here and one woman seems to be the other's twin sister - as the means of examining abstract reflections, we're give pieces of a puzzle to put together. In doing so, whole swathes of the story collapse and what held elusive power by remaining just out of sight is made to be safely ordinary or, worst, downright stupid.

As a Horror fan, I was fairly disappointed that (yet again) another film was tagged/labeled as Horror when it simply isn't. I don't know how long it will take before it finally sinks in - a Thriller is not Horror. The difference might be less obvious and more subtle and nuance depended than the difference between Comedy and Drama, but it's there!

However, as a films fan and a literature fan, I was very pleasantly surprised. The Uninvited Guest has one of the best script/ideas I've ever seen. The way the protagonist Felix is haunted by the intruder in his house (or maybe just his paranoid thoughts of one?) and then ends up as such in a similar situation himself is artistic and almost genius.

The acting of the main characters is excellent, Andoni Gracia and Monica Lopez have really given lives to the script. The other characters I believe weren't important enough to director/writer Morales vision, they could have been given a little more depth. No harm done though, and the sensations of confusion, discomfort and bizarre anxiety in the audience weren't negatively affected.

The ending had a very nice (if somewhat predictable) twist, and could be understood in more than one way. All in all, while not exactly frightening or horrific, The Uninvited Guest is a clever, original and innovative film. Recommended!

A young, thorough architect separates from his girlfriend and finds himself alone in a huge house. What could happen if an unknown man, after asking for using your phone at night, vanished from your living room while you were politely waiting in the kitchen? This is a rather unclassifiable movie. Between drama and thriller (and even a bit of disturbing comedy), it does look lushly filmed -Variety words-, well paced and definitely different from most first movies shot in Spain. Although the film suffers from a few hesitating moves, and it is not for lazy, easy-going audiences, it's well worth watching and contains some really bright, new ideas. One more turn of the screw around loneliness, voyeurism and affections - but a really interesting one.

Felix is an architect reeling from the recent split from his long time girlfriend. Now living alone he in a very large house, he pesters his former lover daily, to come home. One night his door bell rings, Felix jumps up to answer it, hoping its her, but it's a stranger wanting to use his phone, Felix is reluctant to let him use it, but eventually gives in. He leaves the man to have some privacy and goes to his kitchen, where he waits for him to finish, after a short time, Felix returns to the phone to see what's keeping the man…but he's not there. Felix calls out to him, but there is no answer, he checks the house thoroughly thinking the man may have been out to rob him, but again there is no sign of him. Felix locks up the house and retires to bed. He then starts to hear faint noises around the house, could the man be still in the house? Again he finds nothing, this continues for a couple of days until finally he thinks he has cornered the intruder, he calls the police who come immediately and again find nobody. Is there an intruder at all or is Felix going slightly crazy or is there some other reason? The Uninvited Guest touches on a theme that would scare the living daylights out of anybody, an intruder in your own home, the twist here is that its pure mental torture on Felix as he doesn't know for sure that there is someone. The success of a film like this is first of all down to its script and it's a good one, its very clever and delivers plenty of twists in an otherwise simple plot line. The film is actually turned on its head halfway through with one of those clever twists I already mentioned that adds immensely to the thrilling ride, this is one of those films that keeps giving right until the end, I haven't quite analysed all the twists to see if they make any sense, but that doesn't matter as this is a classy enthralling film, one I didn't want to end.

A curiously haunting Spanish film, which, in terms of genre, refuses to be pigeon-holed. The story begins as a mysterious thriller when Felix allows a stranger into his home to use the telephone. Fear and paranoia set in when the visitor inexplicably disappears, leaving Felix to suspect that the man is still lurking within the house. The eerie noises from upstairs eventually become too much for the spooked Felix, and he seeks sanctuary in a neighbour's house. The narrative then unexpectedly changes direction and goes down an incomprehensible and voyeuristic road that confuses as well as questions one's morality. Guillem Morales' impressive, if ambiguous, debut feature film will, at least, prompt baffled viewers to press rewind, after the credits role, to make sense of a film that may be too clever for its own good.

The Uninvited Guest is Guillem Morales (Los Ojos de Julia) first full-length movie, a very good start. We are introduced to a suggestive horror through the concept of letting someone enter your house for a quick phone call just to see that person vanish while you go to the kitchen for a glass of water, not knowing if the person ever left the house. The movie kicks off with a good start, raising curiosity and interest on the viewer. However, as the time passes, even if the movie's development is indeed original, very narrative and well executed, the atmosphere changes, and all the focus and interest one had at the beginning almost fades away. Overall, this is competent thriller/horror movie that ends up feeling unbalanced, although intelligent. Visit thefadingcam blog for more!

Oh what a film - great story, great actors, great direction! Totally original, unpredictable and captivating, this movie proved to be the film experience of the month. Free of all kinds of clichés, it's a good example of a deep and disturbing old world thriller, which can be horrifying and funny at the same time. Perfectly written and grasping, it draws the viewer into a twisted world which could be surrounding each one us. Without stressing the paranoid aspect or attempting to brainwash the spectator, it manages to create a believably claustrophobic atmosphere and yet offer a very humane look upon loneliness and fear without introducing any evil characters or violent situations. I can't help but applaud the authors of this film and give it the full 10 points.

In Germany this movie is called, Uncertain Guest, but Uninvited Guest might be the more appropriate title. I watched this movie at the annual Fantasy Filmfest in the city Stuttgart. I didn't know what to expect, else then a thriller. After a slow beginning this movie gets in gear. And if you're with it for the ride, you'll get rewarded with a really great story/movie. There's only one thing you have to cope with, is that halfway through it'll change lanes ... The movie heads the same direction, but with a slightly different premise ... You'll understand once you watched it! ;o)

This change is necessary, because the movie would have become boring. The pace is going down a little during this change, but after that it accelerates again and will have you on your toes for the rest of the time. And it is the second part of the movie, that has one of the most chilling scenes (at least it had that affect to me, because it created images and thoughts in my head that weren't funny at all) I have seen in the last few years! But be warned, this movie might leave you with more questions than answers. It might, so if you're not afraid of that, try it out and have fun! :o)

The Uninvited Guest starts off pretty damn slow, introducing us to Felix who is an architect that inhabits this majestic home in Barcelona, Spain. At the same time he is dealing with the breakup from his girlfriend, which starts to trigger some paranoia that he is being watched. When an unexpected knock on the door from a stranger, who needs to use the phone and then disappears, Felix soon realizes that there is more to his home than meets the eye.

This was a puzzling movie to watch and filled with suspense and atmosphere, with some creepy moments. The film definitely picks up the pace in its second half, which puts you on the edge of your seat. The film has this very classic look and feel to it that was refreshing and reminded me of an Alfred Hitchcock film or the more recent thriller, Sleep Tight. The film builds to this shocking and baffling conclusion that hit it home for me. The film was clever and original! The acting was subtle and brilliant that had many layers, an intriguing watch. Andoni Gracia, who plays Felix, was captivating to watch and brought us along with his character through this spiraling maze of mystery, uncertainty and tension. At the same time you can't help to think if he was crazy all this time, because he had this creepiness about him. It's one of the few films that I don't mind trying to put the pieces together because I like the mystique of it all. Hell I might even watch it again to figure it all out.

Director, Guillem Morales has made two really good, classic thrillers. First The Uninvited Guest and then Julia's Eyes, he already films his movies like a classic suspenser, he is now one of my favorite directors. He knows how to create this suffocating atmosphere, builds the suspense with ease and hits you with a great twist towards the end. I can't wait for his next thriller; I hope it's soon! Overall, it's a shame that this little thriller that could is not more well known and appreciated. It has a quality about that you don't see much of in today's thrillers, it's not flashy, overly violent and focuses more on the little things that most directors miss. We need more of this in this genre! Recommended! 7 out of 10

Absurd story where a man thinks there may be an intruder living in his house. An attempt is made for a surreal feel in the movie but it just winds up being dumb and dull. We are supposed to be interested in questions like - is the man imagining this scenario and maybe going crazy, or is there really an intruder? But it fails to be involving with cardboard characters and a slow pace where nothing really happens and the answer is who cares what is really going on. The asinine twist that takes place in the middle of the film causes it to truly go off the deep end.

It's not scary in any way, despite what the title may sound like, and not a thriller either. Hard to put this in a genre except to call it mediocre and a bad imitation of a David Lynch film. Everything seems forced with fake tension and unfunny attempts at comedy. I should have given this movie a wide berth.

It's quite intriguing at the beginning, but right away I noticed the performances weren't so good. I couldn't believe any of the characters. Some scenes look clumsy and silly, when they should be dramatic or violent. The general idea of someone living and hiding in your house it's creepy and could be interesting, but it's quite difficult to make it believable, and I didn't feel it worked here. The writing definitely need improving on this one. I think the mayor flaw is the direction, the house is not the best choice for the story, the actors feel amateurish and design in general wasn't great. The photography was interesting by moments, but most of the time is quite average. Still, I don't think it's a bad movie, and it's the kind that you have to think back what happened before and put together the pieces to understand the ending. To be honest I had to read a bit to get the ending, but it's all there, not much open to interpretation. Good movie, but could be much better.

What a surprise. At first, I couldn´t believe the positive reviews. Terrible acting, terrible dialogues, everything seemed to be going in all the wrong directions but every few minutes something happens. A plausible decision here, a surprising turn of events there, enough to forget about the amateurish feel.

Then the film suddenly changes thanks to one of the most ingenious twists I´ve ever seen. From that point on it´s very unpredictable and very entertaining. Details about the first half of the film become relevant and by the end of the film, it´s fun to discuss what happened exactly. I´d recommend to watch it with company.