There is a particular kind of dread that belongs to rental agreements. The too-good-to-be-true price. The landlord who asks questions that feel less like screening and more like selection. The neighbours who welcome you with a warmth that curdles before the boxes are unpacked. Cristian Bernard’s It Comes from Below takes this universally recognisable anxiety and pushes it, with methodical calm, into the realm of horror. The result is a Spanish-Argentinian co-production that arrived on Spanish screens on 8 May 2026 and is now making its way through the international market with the confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is doing.
A Mother, a Building, a Problem
The premise is deceptively simple. Isabel, played by Maribel Verdú, is a single mother seeking a fresh start for herself and her two children. She finds it in a prestigious residential building where the rent is inexplicably low and the admission process is unusually rigorous. Once approved, the family settles in, only to discover that three elderly neighbours from the floor below have taken a particular interest in them. What begins as the discomfort of unfamiliar community slowly twists into something far more sinister, as the building’s peculiar rules and the neighbours’ secretive behaviour suggest that the affordable rent comes with conditions no tenancy agreement would dare spell out.
Bernard, an Argentine genre filmmaker whose previous credits include the cult hit 76-89-03 and the thriller Ecos de un crimen, co-wrote the screenplay with Ana Esperanza Villar Romarís. The film has drawn comparisons to Rosemary’s Baby and The Shining, though Bernard has been careful to position it within a broader register. In interviews with Europa Press, he described the film as carrying “a political subtext” that critiques the housing crisis gripping Europe. “When I decided to make the film here in Spain, I perceived that and said it has to be in the film,” Bernard explained. “Because otherwise the film will be generic. It could take place in any city in the world, but specifically the problem happening in Europe with housing, I found it very interesting to include.”
This grounding in contemporary reality is what distinguishes It Comes from Below from the wave of apartment-horror films that periodically emerge from the genre pipeline. The building is not merely a haunted space; it is a social organism with rules of admission, hierarchies of knowledge, and an unspoken contract that binds its residents to something deeper than shared walls.
Maribel Verdú: From the Labyrinth to the Lower Floor
For Verdú, the film represents a departure from the dramatic and comic roles that have defined a career spanning four decades. Best known internationally for her performance as Mercedes in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth and as Luisa in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también, she brings to Isabel a weary intelligence that anchors the film’s more fantastical elements. In a press interview with Europa Press, Verdú reflected on the parallel between the film’s “shared silence” among neighbours and real-world complicity: “I need to know reality, however painful it may be, however much it hurts. I need to live in this life and know what happens around me, because it humanises me, makes me a more solidary, more empathetic person.”
What makes her performance distinctive, and what critics have highlighted, is the reversal of her typical on-screen dynamic. Where her previous maternal figures fought against the world to protect their children, Isabel in It Comes from Below must allow herself to be protected by them. “In this case, I let myself be carried because when you don’t sleep and your sleep is stolen from you, literally you go crazy, your life stops making sense,” Verdú told Europa Press. “And they – the child characters – are the ones who protect me, care for me, and act as mother to me. It had never happened to me before.”
The casting of Sofía Otero, the Berlinale Silver Bear and Goya Award winner for 20,000 Species of Bees, alongside Ibai Atanes, strengthens the film’s generational tension. Otero, just thirteen at the time of production, has spoken about the experience of working in horror for the first time: “Each director has a very different way of working and each genre is quite different. This film has terror and a slightly more maternal side. It’s very beautiful and I’ve also learned from this – I didn’t know how horror films were shot.”
Bilbao as Character
The production, spearheaded by Carlos Juárez of Basque Films and Guido Rud of FilmSharks, with the participation of Netflix Spain and Spanish public broadcaster RTVE, took advantage of Bilbao’s generous filming incentives, which can reach up to 70 per cent. Juárez, who produced the internationally acclaimed The Platform, spoke of the city’s appeal: “We truly found in Bilbao and its architecture an ideal space to tell this atmospheric story of classic horror cinema.” The decision to shoot in Bilbao during the summer of 2024 was not merely logistical. The Basque city, transformed by the presence of the Guggenheim Museum and its expanded cultural infrastructure, offers a visual language of modernity layered over industrial history – precisely the kind of environment in which a prestigious building with sinister underpinnings feels plausible.
The choice connects to a broader trend in Spanish genre cinema that leverages regional tax credits to produce films of international ambition. As Juárez noted in interviews with Variety, the once-grey industrial city now boasts one of Spain’s most expansive filming incentives, and the architecture of Bilbao provides something that a studio backlot cannot: the uncanny familiarity of real urban space, where the horror feels like it could exist behind any door.
From Tallinn to Cannes: The Festival Route
It Comes from Below had its world premiere at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in November 2025, where it screened as part of the festival’s genre programming. The film went on to win the Best Actress award at the 46th Fantasporto International Fantastic Film Festival in Porto in March 2026, with the jury recognising Verdú’s performance. Its North American premiere is scheduled for the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF) 2026, where it will screen at the historic Teatro Chino.
The festival trajectory has been accompanied by aggressive international sales. FilmSharks locked distribution deals with VerCine for a wide theatrical release in Spain, opening on 120 to 150 screens, and with Nashe Kino for Russia and the CIS, and Entermode for South Korea, ahead of the 2026 European Film Market in Berlin. Guido Rud of FilmSharks described the film as “a remarkably exquisite and visually sophisticated cinematic gem that aims to target fantasy and adventure lovers, especially audiences that are looking for stories that resemble the cinema we all fell in love with, like The Goonies, Super 8, and Stranger Things.” He added, with a note of commercial ambition, that “remake hunters are already haunting this gem.”
The comparisons to The Goonies and Stranger Things sit uneasily alongside the film’s darker impulses, a tension that critics have noted. As one analysis observed, the marketing’s invocation of family-friendly nostalgia sends a different signal from the genuinely creepy horror on display. The line delivered by one of Isabel’s children in the trailer – “Mamá, los gritos salen de aquí” – tells you everything the marketing materials try to soften. Bernard’s film appears to be pulling in two directions: the accessible warmth of a children’s adventure and the suffocating dread of a Rosemary’s Baby-style domestic nightmare. Whether the final product commits to its darker instincts or softens them for broader appeal remains the open question that the international release will answer.
The Politics of Affordable Rent
What elevates It Comes from Below beyond its genre mechanics is its engagement with the housing crisis that has reshaped cities across Europe. The premise – a family drawn into a building by impossibly low rent, only to find themselves trapped in a system whose rules they did not understand – resonates with a generation of renters for whom affordable housing has become a form of quiet desperation. Bernard’s decision to embed this critique within a horror framework is astute: the genre has always excelled at making the familiar feel threatening, and there are few things more familiar, or more threatening, than the power imbalance between landlord and tenant.
The film arrives at a moment when Spanish cinema is experiencing a resurgence of international visibility. The Platform, also produced by Juárez and Basque Films, demonstrated that Spanish genre filmmaking could reach a global audience through streaming platforms and festival circuits. It Comes from Below follows a similar path, with Netflix Spain’s participation ensuring visibility beyond theatrical release, while the international sales strategy targets the kind of genre-literate audience that has made films like REC, The Orphanage, and Julia’s Eyes into enduring reference points.
Whether It Comes from Below achieves the cultural penetration of those predecessors will depend on its ability to navigate the tonal tightrope between accessibility and genuine unease. But with Verdú at its centre, a director unafraid to let the horror serve a larger argument, and a production infrastructure that understands both the art and the business of genre cinema, it arrives as one of the more compelling entries in the 2026 horror calendar. The screams, as the trailer promises, are coming from below. The question is whether audiences will be brave enough to listen.
