Don't Listen (2020)

Don’t Listen earns its chills the old-fashioned way: by turning a familiar haunted-house setup into a pressure cooker of grief, dread, and creeping uncertainty, where every hallway feels a little too long and every silence feels loaded. Ángel Gómez Hernández directs with a confident, crowd-pleasing sense of scare craft, using production design and shadowy spaces to make the home feel like it’s watching you back, while the sound work is so unnervingly precise you’ll start listening for things in your own room. It’s the kind of horror-thriller that keeps tightening the screws—smartly paced, tense, and genuinely entertaining even when you think you know where it’s headed. Fair warning: it goes to some very dark places and isn’t shy about intense, graphic material, but if you want a supernatural ride that hits both the nerves and the emotions, this one delivers.

Don’t Listen (aka Voces) is trying to deliver a slick, crowd-pleasing haunted-house ride with a grieving family at its center and a paranormal-investigation angle to keep the momentum up. The problem is it leans hard on familiar genre beats—creepy kid drawings, ominous noises, jump scares, “the house has a dark history”—so if you’ve seen a few modern ghost movies, you’ll likely predict the turns and notice the thin character work and occasional logic gaps. It is effective in atmosphere and has a couple of genuinely nasty images, but it’s more about piling on scares than telling a story that feels fresh or emotionally earned. Skip it if you’re tired of formula horror or sensitive to intense scenes involving child death, suicide, and torture imagery; try it if you just want a fast, grim, Spanish-language spook show with decent production values.