★★★★ out of ★★★★★
Intensity 🩸🩸🩸 out of 🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸
Directed by Emilio Portes
Mexican chiller Don’t Leave the Kids Alone is a white-knuckle thrill ride involving two young brothers grieving over their father’s recent death in dangerous ways — in a house hosting something that is more than eager to influence them.
Synopsis from Calgary Underground Film Festival: Recently widowed, a single mother attends a party, leaving her two young sons alone. As the brothers play, their rivalry raises its head. After the babysitter cancels at the last minute, Cata makes a hasty decision to attend her work event, leaving her children, Mati and Emi, at home. With their new house all to themselves, the two brothers are having a blast and set out to unpack their prized video game console, unaware of the consequences. Soon, something will make them believe, each one separately, that his own brother is plotting to murder him. What begins as a blast of carefree play soon turns into a claustrophobic horror story set over a single night in the ’80s.
Director Emilio Portes’s Don’t Leave the Kids Alone (No dejes a los niños solos; Mexico, 2025) brings sibling rivalry to a chilling new level. On their own for the evening while newly widowed mother Catalina (Ana Serradilla) attends a party to close the deal on the family’s new house, elementary school-age brothers Matías (Juan Pablo Velasco) and Emiliano (Ricardo Galina) spar, both deliberately and accidentally setting Chekhovian traps galore — for example, you just now that bow and arrow is going to mean trouble at some point — as they break the rules Catalina set for them and argue about the affections for and from their mother and deceased father.
This being a horror film, the huge new house naturally has a frightening history. Catalina was unaware of this until secrets started coming to the fore at the party. Meanwhile, Emiliano refuses to take his required medication despite his older brother Matías’s bargaining. Their unwise decision to try a Ouija board that they found leads to the younger sibling believing that their deceased father is communicating with them.
If you find that ill-behaved children in fear-fare films grate on your nerves, you may want to pass on Don’t Leave the Kids Alone — but you would be missing out on a terrific horror movie. Velasco and Galina give incredible performances as the two brothers who are suffering in different ways from the recent death of their father in a traffic accident in which all four family members were involved. They absolutely nail the tension between the two boys, along with the fear and dark influences that take hold of them during their time alone. Serradilla adds strong support as their mother, who is being put through several different wringers of her own at the social gathering.
Those Chekhovian traps I mentioned naturally come into play, as do supernatural and the occult. Portes, who co-wrote the screenplay with Alan Maldonado, expertly balances these elements along with social and political commentary and dark humor. Cinematographer Martín Boege does super work, with the camera often on the move through the large house and at the party as characters often move from room to room to room — and plenty of danger lurks outside on this stormy night, as well. Aldo Max Rodriguez’s fine score helps add extra tension to the proceedings.
Don’t Leave the Kids Alone sets out to entertain, and does just that with its fingernail-chewing set-ups and jaw-dropping payoffs — and what a climax. Portes, cast, and crew have crafted a strong contender for my top 10 list of favorite horror films of 2025.
Review by Joseph Perry
Don’t Leave the Kids Alone screens as part of the 2025 Calgary Underground Film Festival, which runs April 17–27. For more information, visit https://www.calgaryundergroundfilm.org/.
