‘Family Fears Another Night of Terror’ Sitges Review: Cristian Ponce Turns A 1980s TV Set Into A Haunted Loop Where The Unseen Is The Scariest Part

Off-screen space is a concept so widespread in film jargon that it’s easy to forget not everyone knows it. The term refers to everything that falls outside the frame, everything that isn’t visible on the screen. That zone is understood to work, as it does in the real world, as a continuation of whatever our eyes take in. A house is still a house even if we only see part of it. A person we hear in the next room is still a person even if we can’t see them. We assume a continuum between inside and outside, between what is seen and what isn’t.

The curious thing is that cinema, and even more so television, and more still theater, doesn’t always work that way in practice. The part of a house we can’t see may not exist, and neither may the person supposedly upstairs. Anyone who has visited a film set knows this. There are houses, shops and even entire streets that are nothing but sets, and an outside built solely from sounds added in postproduction. The continuity of space is something the viewer constructs, helped along by the conventions of the filmed image. In theater it is more evident still: everything unseen sits behind curtains and drapes. That is how the space of fiction gets built.

Family Fears Another Night of Terror plays with those assumptions. The latest film from the director of History of the Occult works, as that one did, with TV consumption and with the memory of television past. Like that earlier film, it is structured as a TV program from the 1980s, 1986 to be exact. The show shares its title with the movie and unfolds on a set in which a family must, well, the title says it all. Each segment adds one more member (the mother first, then the father, then the son and finally the daughter), and in each one they are put through the dreaded night.

What does that night consist of? Objects move around on their own and the mother gets scared. Meanwhile, the father believes the neighbors are coming for him in order to replace him with someone else. The teenage son is wrapped up in his own world, trying to decipher the lyrics of a metal band. And the college-age daughter shows up with «strange ideas.» In between sits the context: the military service draft lottery, university marches, tensions with the «neighbors.» The unease that builds from the atmosphere Cristian Ponce creates comes down to a question: is what we’re watching the dreaded «night of terror» that gives the TV show its name, or have the characters themselves, in Pirandellian fashion, begun to realize they are part of a game?

There is little point in giving away much more, since the film moves along a very porous border between horror and «meta-horror.» Are the people outside, watching the characters, curious and troublesome neighbors, or the technical crew of the TV show itself? Are the characters rebelling against the plot supposedly prepared for them, or is the prepared plot the one we’re watching? «We have no past or future, we live in the present and in fear,» says one of them, posing a question that is at once practical and deeply philosophical. These actors, these characters, this TV show exist in a temporal and spatial loop that can’t be resolved. And watching them recalls being a child who, not quite grasping what television was, assumed it was full of tiny people living inside the box.

The cast, made up of the «first actor» (sic) Diego Velázquez, Nadia Lozano, Max Federico Alemán, Mora Magnarelli and Jeanette Bulzgis, plays its cryptic dialogue scenes in a way that can be read as naturalistic (at times they go for that) or as doors opening onto unknown worlds. The line, I insist, is porous. Resources are few, and with them Ponce manages to build a great deal of atmosphere and an enormous sense of uncertainty. Five actors, a single set (maybe two), black curtains and plenty of sound effects that suggest the world extends beyond that core. Toward what? Who knows? Does the outside even exist in fiction?

Over a brief, concise 82 minutes, the creator of The Kirlian Frequency raises more questions than answers. He flirts with the Lynchian (the curtains work very well in that sense) and with the experimental (his cinema is a lo-fi version of Jane Schoenbrun’s), and at times he comes across as something much more traditional. His strategy of imitating those 1980s TV programs means betting on the everyday realism of a prototypical family in the living room of an average Argentine home of the era. It’s a realism that gets cut like a knife when the hidden, unknown outside threatens to burst into the inside. Is it reality intruding, fantasy, or the production crew? In Familia teme enfrentar una nueva noche de terror, all three can be the same thing. Off-screen space, after all, has the same dimensions and the same mystery as the entire universe.