Don't Listen (2020)

The Spanish supernatural thriller Don't Listen arrives with modest ambitions and fulfills them with a certain grim efficiency. Daniel and Sara flip houses, which is to say they buy, renovate, and resell them, and their latest acquisition sits on ground that has been unwell for several centuries. Their son Eric hears voices, draws unsettling crayon pictures, and eventually drowns in the backyard pool. Into this domestic catastrophe walk Germán, a veteran parapsychologist with a book deal, and his daughter Ruth, a sound engineer who arrives with monitors, thermal imagers, and a healthy skepticism. She is the most competent person on screen, and the film does not appear to notice.

The hauntings escalate through stigmata-like scratches, self-starting toy robots, and a plague of flies that turns out to be the tell. The estate was once the site of an Inquisition courthouse, and the basement holds a caged skeleton and a pear of anguish, an instrument designed to keep a woman from speaking. The film deploys this history as atmosphere, not argument. A reviewer at Forbes complained that the movie revives the myth of the evil witch, and it is true that the bruja torments the living without much motive, but the screenplay has no interest in making a case about anything. It wants the witch to be frightening, and she is.

Audiences seeking social commentary will find none. The cast is a natural Spanish ensemble. There are no romantic subplots, no identity politics, no sermons about the environment or the housing market, though a film about house-flipping could plausibly reach for one. The Inquisition appears strictly as a source of bad plumbing and worse ghosts. What we have is a haunted house picture that respects the machinery of the genre, kills a psychologist with a tree branch in the first act, and declines to instruct us on how to vote. It is not a film with a message. It is a film with a fly problem.