Sleep Tight

In one of the most famous scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Anthony Perkins tries to dispose of a murder victim by putting her in the trunk of her car and then pushing it into a swamp. As the vehicle sinks—way too slowly—the film momentarily encourages the audience to sympathize with a madman’s frustrations. Jaume Balagueró’s Sleep Tight is like a feature-length version of that Psycho scene. Luis Tosar stars as a misanthropic, suicidal apartment-complex doorman/handyman who’s dedicated himself to making the residents’ lives miserable, in ways both subtle and horrific. He waters the plants at the wrong time of day, so they’ll die; he feeds one old woman’s dog the wrong food, to give it diarrhea; he hides rotten fruit in the back of a refrigerator; and so on. He’s especially determined to depress the chipper, pretty young Marta Etura. He sends her threatening letters and texts, and sneaks into her apartment to inject skin-irritants into her beauty products and to plant insect eggs. As Tosar perpetually skirts around the edge of being caught—or being exposed by Etura’s nosy pre-teen neighbor Iris Almeida Molina—the viewer has to decide whether to root for this creep to succeed.