Sleep Tight follows Cesar, a concierge at an upscale Barcelona apartment building who has decided that if he cannot be happy, he will at least control who around him gets to be. He fixes his attention on Clara, one of the tenants, and uses the kind of access a concierge has to every door in the building to make her life harder than she realizes. Released in Spain in October 2011, it is a stalker thriller built on proximity rather than jump scares.
What sets it apart is whose perspective you are stuck in. Jaume Balaguero, fresh off the found footage scares of the REC series, shoots almost the entire film through Cesar rather than Clara, so the audience spends two hours following a predator's planning instead of rooting for a victim's escape. It is a colder kind of tension than most stalker films attempt, and a deliberate one.
Luis Tosar plays Cesar without a trace of cartoon villainy, which is precisely what makes the film work, and the performance won him Best Actor at the following year's Gaudi Awards, where Sleep Tight also took home prizes for direction, screenplay and editing. It holds a 91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, unusually strong for a film this deliberately unpleasant.
The film did well enough to earn a South Korean remake in 2018, Door Lock, which made the opposite choice and told the same basic story from the victim's side instead. That contrast says a lot about how unusual Balaguero's approach still looks. Revisit Sleep Tight for that control of space alone, the way one apartment building becomes the entire world for both Cesar and Clara.
