[REC]⁴ Apocalypse (2014)

Four films into a Spanish franchise about a demonic pathogen and its increasingly unlucky hosts, the series arrives at a quarantine ship, a self-destruct sequence, and a journalist named Ángela who has spent three installments being chased by things that want to occupy her body. Jaume Balagueró returns to direct, Manuela Velasco returns to scream, and the found-footage gimmick is quietly retired in favor of conventional staging. The result is a competent action horror picture that understands its obligations and discharges them without fuss.

The cast is a Spanish ensemble doing Spanish ensemble work, with one Black performer in a supporting role and no commentary attached to his presence. Ángela is a woman and a survivor, which is true, and the film offers no argument about what that might mean. There is no racial reckoning aboard the vessel, no critique of the private laboratory funding the research, no meditation on the climate or the body or the mind. The pathogen is a parasite. The soldiers are soldiers. The infected are hungry. That is the entire transaction.

This is not a complaint. A genre film that knows what it is and delivers the harpoon gun, the exploding ship, and the closing cab ride where the driver jokes about a party has done its job. There is nothing here that preaches, nothing that sermonizes, nothing that asks the audience to examine its conscience between jump scares. We are left with a clean specimen: a horror sequel with no social agenda to speak of, only blood, water, and a parasite that ends up inside a fish. It is a modest achievement, and an honest one.