- Directed by Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza
- Written by Jaume Balagueró, Luiso Berdejo, Paco Plaza
- Stars Manuela Velasco, Ferran Terraza, Jorge-Yama Serrano
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 18 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcW7jLYKxAQ
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This starts out calm and normal and goes into an adrenaline rush that barely lets up until the movie ends. It’s a fast-moving found footage that’s really well done. It was almost hard to keep up and read the subtitles at the same time at some points.
Synopsis
TV reporter Angela records her show from the fire station. She’s going to accompany the firefighters on their nightly work. She interviews some firemen, and it’s all pretty boring and mundane with not anything really happening.
Finally, they get a call, and Angela and her cameraman, Pablo, get to go along. Jose, Alex, and Manu are in the firetruck with them. The call said that there’s someone trapped in a building, and the neighbors heard screams. The firemen have to get into a locked apartment, where an old woman is said to have fallen.
They get inside, and the old woman is standing at the end of the hallway. As the men approach, they see the woman jumping around, screaming. As the building superintendent tries to remove the cameraman, the old woman bites his face and neck.
The firemen carry the injured man downstairs, but someone outside won’t allow anyone to leave– the gate is locked. The health authorities have decided to seal off the buildings for health concern reasons. Loads of cops have blocked off the street.
BOOM! Suddenly, one of the firefighters falls down the stairway shaft and is severely injured– he’s been bitten as well. There is much screaming and the camera goes off.
Some time passes, and Angela and Pablo go upstairs alone to investigate. A hysterical, angry woman runs toward the camera, and the police shoot her. Manu and Alex find a back door, but it’s sealed off as well. Everyone’s cell phones stop working, and they are all told that they’re under forced quarantine. The building is soon covered in plastic.
Angela interviews several of the people trapped in the building. Guillem is a medical intern, and he works on the two injured men, but he’s no doctor. Then there’s an old couple who called in the woman’s screams in the first place. One woman is making plans to sue. An old man blames the Chinese people that live in the building. One little girl is sick and misses her dog, who is at the vet. We get to know some of the characters a bit, which is good.
Finally, the health inspector arrives in a self-contained suit. Pablo climbs up and peeks through a window and sees that they have handcuffed the injured men to their beds. The injured policemen attack the inspector and Guillem. The inspector’s suit prevents him from getting bitten, but Guillem goes berserk.
The health inspector says that they got a call yesterday from a vet. A sick dog went berserk and had to be put down. Jennifer, the sick little girl, attacks her mother. It was her dog. They chase the girl upstairs, and then they notice that the old woman from before is gone. The young police man gets bitten, and things get more out of control at that point.
Some of the zombies start eating people, and Angela freaks out. The old man knows of a way out in the basement workshop, and he tells the others about it.
Before long, it’s just Angela, Pablo, and Manu, and Manu doesn’t last much longer. Pablo and Angela run upstairs to the disused penthouse as all the zombies pursue them upstairs. They find all kinds of weird stuff in there, both religious and scientific. There’s a big poster about “Possession” and many articles all about one specific possessed girl.
Then Angela finds an audio tape that explains everything. The man there was trying to find a vaccine against Possession, but it mutated and acted like the flu. The girl he was treating is uncurable and beyond all hope, and he mentions locking her up. Pablo finds someone scary in the attic, but then his light breaks.
Pablo turns on the camera’s night vision, and things only go downhill from there.
Commentary
It starts off very slow and mundane with the firemen’s daily lives, but it gets crazy pretty quickly. Things just keep escalating. There’s a lot of frantic screaming and fast-talking in Spanish, and it’s all very hectic in this found-footage film.
Surprisingly, they explain the whole thing at the end, which we didn’t expect from a zombie movie. The creature effects and gore are well done, but the way things accelerate relentlessly is probably the best feature of the film.