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Stars: Ana Serradilla, Ricardo Galina, Juan Pablo Velasco
Director: Emilio Portes
Distributor: Videocine

“Where’s my tip?”

Day two of Grimmfest continued with an interesting one… A world cinema film featuring children as the main characters! From writer-director Emilio Portes comes Don’t Leave the Kids Alone, a Mexican horror film centred around two young children who are left home alone to battle out the dark of night.

When widowed mother, Catalina, (Ana Serradilla) loses out on last-minute childcare for her two young sons, Emiliano and Matias (Ricardo Galina and Juan Pablo Velasco respectively), she makes the rash decision to leave them home alone in their relatively new home. Two children continually at one another’s throats, the slightly elder of the two has been given the responsibility of his brother, and the biggest challenge is to ensure he takes his medication.

From what initially seems to be a chilled night of ordering a pizza and watching horror films on TV, the tension grows between the brothers in parallel with their mother’s frustration at a party she finds herself at. In this parallel of events, both scenarios begin to bounce off one another. Suddenly, the house where the two boys are kept isn’t quite as it seems when Catalina becomes inadvertently knowledgeable of the previous owner’s dismay.

Whenever children are exploited in horror, or are in mortal danger, the notion often feels cheap or a low bar to aim for in horror. Children in peril is never pleasant. Given the lack of intelligence or maturity in children, whenever they are placed within danger, they are essentially, starting on minus points. Often in Don’t Leave the Kids Alone, the real danger is not the spookiness within this massive house that they live in, bu

Given that the concept is of these two young, often misbehaved children at home alone, the intensity is through the roof at times. As a viewer, we know that something isn’t quite right about this house or their living situation, and given that the two boys are viciously accident and error prone, there’s an eternal pre-empt warning of chaos. In viewing, there’s a continual expectancy for something to go horribly wrong, through the kids’ fault or someone/something else’s.

Additionally, one of Don’t Leave the Kids Alone’s greatest strengths is its immersion into the 80s/90s of its setting. Visually, this film could sit anywhere between Poltergeist and Jurassic Park. The attention to detail of the era did not feel too try-hard or forced either, which was great.

All in all, Don’t Leave the Kids Alone seems like a fun concept on paper – Home Alone with ghosts? Instead, Emilio Portes’ film is a lot more sinister and thematically darker than initially seems. Though two children take the lead roles, the back stories of all involved are so dark and disturbing, this horror film should be far from the viewing eyes of children.