[REC]² (2009)

There is a specific kind of frustration that only found-footage horror can produce: staring at a pitch-black screen, squinting into the grain, waiting for a scare that never quite arrives because the night-vision camera is pointing at a wall. Again. [REC] left me a little cold for exactly this reason, and its 2009 sequel doubles down on every choice that bothered me the first time around. I wanted to like it. I really did. But by the end, I was just exhausted and mildly annoyed.

Paco Plaza and Jaume Balagueró pick up the story in almost real-time, dropping a tactical team into the same quarantined Barcelona apartment block we already know inside out. As a structural trick, the immediacy is genuinely neat. As an experience for anyone who sat through the original, it has a deeply tedious quality of deja vu. We already know the rules of this infection, we already know the layout of that building, and watching a fresh set of characters stumble through the same beats with slightly different gear feels less like a continuation and more like a remix nobody asked for.

My bigger gripe, though, is the darkness. I've always maintained that zombie cinema works best when the undead are actually visible, when you can see the full, rotting scale of what's coming for the characters. The sheer overwhelming mass of a horde is where the real dread lives. Here, the infected are largely swallowed by shadow, glimpsed in lurching fragments through a night-vision lens that turns every corridor into an indistinct grey smear. I understand that "too dark to see" is a deliberate aesthetic choice, an attempt to keep you on edge, to make the imagination do the heavy lifting. But for me it doesn't work like that. When you can't actually see the monster, you're not scared. You're just squinting and wondering whether the practical effects department got their money's worth.

And by all accounts, someone worked hard on those effects. Which makes the decision to keep them perpetually shrouded in murk all the more maddening. You find yourself desperately wishing the filmmakers would just turn on the bloody lights for thirty seconds and let us appreciate what's actually there. Instead, the frantic shaky-cam and the relentless darkness combine to create something that feels less like controlled tension and more like a mess.

There are moments where the film finds its footing. The opening stretch has genuine urgency, and the conceit of extending the nightmare without a breath of relief shows real commitment. But commitment to a flawed approach is still a flawed approach. The narrative offers little in the way of evolution or surprise. Plaza and Balagueró had a genuinely terrifying sandbox to play in and the chance to expand it, to take the mythology somewhere new, to throw some proper light on the horror they'd constructed. Instead, they locked the door, kept the lights off, and hoped the audience's goodwill from the first film would carry them through.

It didn't, for me. Two stars, and I mean that generously.

If you want a horror sequel that actually earns its running time, you'll need to look elsewhere. This one is a visually murky slog that mistakes obscurity for atmosphere. The genre deserves better, and frankly, so do the poor sods trapped in that apartment block.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 2009 | Watched: 2026-07-18

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