An apartment can make a satisfying horror set because a tenant knows exactly which bits of it need attention. A gap under a door lets in light. A noise behind a wall might have been going on for months. Crawlers gets a useful head start by turning the Paradiso Palms complex into a place where residents have learned to live around ordinary defects before an infestation makes those habits dangerous. The building manager Serena, played by Matilda Lutz, has something rarer than exceptional bravery to offer a movie like this. She knows who is supposed to be on the other side of those doors.
Ángel Gómez Hernández is most effective when the ordinary scale of the creatures matters. A spider can be an obvious threat to the audience and remain within a few inches of someone who has no idea it is there. The time it takes for that person to notice is better suspense than any explanation of how fast the infestation is spreading. A sequence involving a resident listening to recorded affirmations in bed understands the advantage. The voice offers comfort and the familiar space offers privacy, which means the person on the mattress is alone with a danger they cannot yet see.
The building’s different kinds of privacy are an available source of variety. A resident alone with a recording can let a scare unfold at one pace. The manager trying to work out why somebody is failing to answer a door has to proceed at another. The same floor plan can make both encounters understandable, provided the film has given us a minute to learn how people pass through it. Gómez Hernández sometimes gets a nasty surprise from the distance between those two accounts of the space. Elsewhere the cutting can be so eager to get back to the bite that the building’s geometry does less work than it could.
The stronger scares have that small friction between the reason someone does an ordinary thing and what the audience knows about the space around them. Once the movie is operating chiefly as an evacuation story, those chances grow scarcer. An announcement about quarantine can create a solid initial trap. It also tends to give different people the same objective. When residents are defined primarily by whether they deserve what the movie is about to do to them, the complex becomes a selection of available rooms instead of a place anyone has learned how to live in.
Lutz helps keep the two versions of the setting in contact. A manager has the ambiguous standing of someone who may be called upon to enforce rules she did not write. That makes Serena’s practical authority more interesting than the authority of the people who can announce that the tenants have to stay put. The film’s gestures toward property and class make sense in that arrangement. The people with the least say over the building are the ones who have to test how well it seals. There is enough in that idea to make the landlord’s behavior matter beyond determining how loudly the audience will cheer when he is in trouble.
The quarantine also poses a useful question about who is credible. Serena has the everyday knowledge that can help distinguish a frightened exaggeration from a genuinely strange report. A landlord or an outside authority has the standing to act on either. That gap is as good a setup for a joke as it is for a scare. Everybody in the building has probably been through a much less lethal version of it. When the spiders grow into a bigger spectacle, the film can still deliver an effective jolt. The joke about the ordinary failure to take a complaint seriously has a longer life.
At around eighty minutes Crawlers is efficient enough to be over while a fear of spiders can still do it some favors. The brevity also exposes the uneven attention paid to the residents. The moment of waiting before a spider makes itself felt usually has more tension than the business of explaining what comes next. The film can be nasty and funny in the space of one such encounter. It could do with a few more chances for people to respond to their neighbors in ways the action does not immediately require.
