REC (Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, 2007)

Manuela Velasco in REC

Cast: Manuela Velasco, Ferran Teraza, Jorge-Yamam Serrano, Pablo Rosso, David Vert, Vicente Gil, Martha Carbonell, Carlos Vicente, Maria Teresa Ortega, Manuel Bronchud, Akemi Goto, Kao Chenmin, Maria Lanau, Claudia Silva, Carlos Lasarte. Screenplay: Jaume Balagueró, Luiso Berdejo, Paco Plaza. Cinematography: Pablo Rosso. Production design: Gemma Fauria. Film editing: David Gallart. 

Messy and unsettling, Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's REC takes the camera's viewpoint as a vapid young TV reporter (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman (cinematographer Pablo Rosso, voiced by Javier Coromina) tape an episode for a TV series. They ride along with a small crew of firefighters on what sounds like a routine call: The screams of a woman in a locked apartment have disturbed her neighbors. Once there, however, they and the cops who join them not only encounter the unexpected, but they're also forced to stay in the building after it's quarantined by the authorities for a suspected biohazard. I wish that Velasco's character had not been allowed to grow so screechy and hysterical as the events they encounter escalate -- they're nerve-wracking enough on their own -- but REC does the "found footage" approach to horror as well as I've ever seen it done. Though it winds up as pretty much a routine "zombie virus" movie, it has a bloody actuality that's quite disturbing.