Review of Sleep Tight (2011) by Ola G — 11 Nov 2015

Apartment concierge Cesar (Luis Tosar) is a miserable person who believes he was born without the ability to be happy. As a result, he decides his mission is to make life hell for everyone around him. A majority of the tenants are easy to agitate, but Clara (Marta Etura) proves to be harder than the most. So Cesar goes to creepy extremes to make this young woman mentally break down. Things get even more complicated in this twisted relationship when her boyfriend, Marcos (Alberto San Juan), shows up...

The main plot is a man who claims himself to be physiologically incapable of happiness. His solution to the problem is to make everybody else in his close range miserable. Meaning the main character Cesar is hardly likeable nor understandable in his actions in my point of view. Particularly in how he treats Clara and the result of that. I had hopes for a good suspenseful spanish thriller, but was served with something that never really raised my pulse despite a general dark atmosphere. Maybe the suspense became too subtle and just vanished due to that. Luis Tosar was good as Cesar and the lovely Marta Etura was good as Clara despite her character´s difficulty of understanding what was happening. And there´s pot holes in the logic of the story as. I thought the action and behaviour of the young neighbour girl was just not logic. She simply felt too "adult" in her thinking and how she blackmailed Cesar. However, the psychological terror idea of having Cesar ending up underneath Clara´s bed each night is great horror material. "Sleep Tight" was not as good as I hoped it to be, and this story won´t haunt my sub conscience.