Francesca (Ana Torrent, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE) has never gotten over the death of a child ten years before. The birth of her son has her anxious over his well-being (she gets up in the middle of the night to check his breath with a hand-mirror and is glued to the baby monitor). Her husband Pedro (Francisco Boira) decides they need to get out of the city so they purchase a massive house in the country that used to belong to a recently-deceased bishop. Coincidentally, Blanca (Maria Alfonsa Rosso, VOLVER) has woken from a sixty-year coma just as the sanitorium in which she is staying is shut down by miracle-busting Jesuit psychiatrist Father Miguel (Héctor Colomé, MAD LOVE). She recovers quickly and leaves behind a clue for the priest that implicates her involvement in a film experiment to capture supernatural phenomena on film. Meanwhile at the house, Francesca experiences strange visions and fears that something wants to hurt her baby. Pedro thinks she is too stressed to take care of her infant son and only daughter Rosa (Miriam Cepa) seems to believe her. Blanca has been skulking around the property. She gives Francesca and old photograph in which Francesca recognizes a little girl as one of the specters plaguing her. She tells Francesca to see Father Miguel. Father Miguel visits the house and discovers numerous votive offerings in attic and realizes that the house must have been a site of miracles. They discover a film cannister that reveals that the site had been visited by the branch of the Spanish newsreel service that covered religious phenomena for the church. Research into the secret archive reveals that the house was once a school and that three little girls claimed to have visions of the virgin Mary. Pilgrimages came to house to be cured by the girls but they grew sicker instead and the church realized that the force in the house was evil and that it is still present.

The film's original title NO-DO refers to Spain's state-controlled newsreel service during the Franco regime so it is nicely subversive that the plot should have had the the church using the service to cover - and cover up - reportage of religious phenomena. That said, this is not one of the better examples of new Spanish horror. That both the basement and the attic hold dark secrets is distinctive of the cluttered script which can't decide between two haunted house movie extremes. Is the point finding out the truth behind the outcome of the investigation into the school? If so, then why does it seem like the forces want to frighten people away? If the evil force is all that remains, then why is it drawing in the very type of people capable of destroying it? Father Miguel's backstory – covering up a case of sainthood because the woman was a prositute – is not really necessary here (nor is his conflict with a fellow priest who feels that the church's secrecy is more important than helping Francesca and Pedro). The story cuts back and forth between Father Miguel, Blanca, and Francesca so much that it really is not until the half-hour mark that the story finds focus. Virtually every scene transition has to be arty (fading to black and white scratchy film and back to spotless color, horizontal dolly moves with some green-screened vertical border covering up the cut, or brief blurry bits of the lost newsreel) but this is then dropped in the last twenty minutes or so when the story's momentum finally picks up. The CGI is quite accomplished but some of the aggressive color correction pulls one out of the story (how can you not expect to see ectoplasmic entities when everything's so desaturated). One SIXTH SENSE-esque twist manages to simultaneously induce groans and surprise the viewer but the questions it leaves you asking punch holes into the plot rather than suggest cohesiveness. Torrent (who made such an impression as a child in SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE and then later again in Alejandro Amenabar's TESIS) is good as usual but the material isn't particularly demanding. While the film's evocative unofficial English title THE BECKONING probably did not sound commercial enough, it would have been more appropriate than THE HAUNTING (already the title of two American horror films - Robert Wise's brilliant adaptation of Shirley Jackson's novel and Jan De Bont's trashy remake).