Luis Tosar, left, in SLEEP TIGHT (Dark Sky Films/MPI Media Group)

César (Luis Tosar) works at the front desk as the concierge of a small Barcelona apartment building. He’s the guy in charge who makes sure the tenants are happy–but that’s just his day job. By night, he likes to track Clara (Marta Etura), a young, attractive woman who we don’t know too much about except that she is, well, attractive, nice, and likes to dance carefree around the apartment when no one is around… except, yeah, César is there watching her when she doesn’t know it, hiding under her bed. While she sleeps, he comes out and, among other things, applies some sort of weird cream on her body that makes her break out in a rash, and leaves rotten fruit and food for swarms of cockroaches to descend into the apartment.

In other words, César, by any rational account, is a creep. And yet he’s also our protagonist, and this is where director Jaume Balagueró makes things tricky. (This is his solo follow-up after co-directing the first two [REC] zombie films, which were also edge-of-your-seat thrillers.) At first, we’re not sure why César’s doing this. Maybe he is just depressed… yeah, maybe that’s it. He is often all alone, and he visits his sick mom in the hospital, which should lend him some sympathy from the audience—until we see how he treats her, which is to tell her all of his nasty little secrets. Since she is too ill to speak, she just sheds here and there tears for her sad, hopeless son.

Speaking of crazy sons and their mothers, this tale is like a full-scale, even more (bleeped)-up take on the Norman Bates paradigm as the audience follows along a character they know is the bad guy. If Hitchcock made people afraid of showers, how about a director making people afraid of their own beds? And admit it, you kinda want to see Norman sink that car to the bottom of the swamp. In this film, there is a scene much like that, when César is in Clara’s apartment at the same time as her boyfriend. César stays the night as he usually does, but awakes in the morning in the bathtub. Uh oh.

What’s so striking is that Balagueró never makes it easy to really connect with this guy. In fact, it’s hard to, if ever. Yet here he is, our lead character as he expertly answers the police’s questions, and always has the appearance of cordiality (except at one point when he tells it straight to an older woman tenant about the sad state of her life—a real gut-punch of a scene).

As César goes about Clara’s apartment at night, it’s hard to look away. A lot of that can be attributed to Tosar, who looks like Joaquin Phoenix in the eyes and face, but older and balder—and with those thick eyebrows, too. You almost, almost want to feel sorry for the guy just because of how much feeling Tosar oozes into the character, the desperation and the sort of quiet but determined madness. Yet you’ll recoil just as much as (some of) the other characters.

Sleep Tight is a keen find for DVD viewing or on demand, sort of like a super-disturbed descendant of Luis Buñuel, with his tales of sexually obsessed, almost absurdly religiously dedicated characters (insect references included). If you feel the need to turn it off at certain points, I don’t blame you, but for certain sick fellow moviegoers open to an unconventional experience, this hits the spot.