By: Michele Schultz
A Chilling Look at Responsibility and Rivalry.
No Dejes a los Niños Solos (Don’t Leave the Kids Alone, 2025) ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐.5
Cata recently widowed, is forced to leave her kids alone for the night. With the house to themselves, mati and emi have a blast not knowing something will make them believe, each one separately, that his own brother’s plotting to kill him.
East Coast genre festival, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, hosted the New York premiere of Emilio Portes’ feature, ‘Don’t Leave The Kids Alone‘, fresh off his 2017 ‘Belzebuth‘. Portes thrusts the viewer back into the vulnerable pre-teen age, exploring the intense anxieties surrounding children left unsupervised.
The film wastes no time playing on the familiar trope that “mom is away, the kids would play,” yet it quickly subverts this expectation. The plot is simple about recently widowed mother Catalina (Ana Serradilla) who must attend a work function, leaving her two pre-teen boys, Mati (Juan Pablo Velasco) and Emi (Ricardo Galina), home alone after the sitter cancels. She is forced to put the older Mati in charge of his little brother, setting the stage for domestic horror.
Through atmospheric tension and claustrophobic staging, the film captures its deep-seated fears associated with early independence and the unknown dangers lurking just “outside” the comfort of the home.
The film ditches cliché and instead of mischief, we get a slow boil of sibling tension that drives the film’s creeping suspense. Portes frames the narrative around the mother’s anxieties, effectively capturing every parent’s fear regarding the appropriate age for unsupervised time. It also comments on the meta-notion when pre-teen kids are old enough to watch an R-rated horror film.
’Don’t Leave The Kids Alone‘ is an immediate, chilling study for forces us to confront the valid paranoia and worries our parents have about leaving us home alone at a heavy cost in the world today.
Bringing the best of domestic and international genre cinema to New York City since 2016, the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival is a premier East Coast genre festival that embodies the eclectic spirit of its namesake.
Brooklyn Horror not only provides the nightmare fuel that audiences expect but also prides itself on challenging those expectations, spotlighting films that push the boundaries of what is normally deemed horror.
Taking place in venues throughout the borough every October, BHFF compliments its ambitious features and shorts programming with exciting and unique live events, crafting a must-attend festival experience for industry members and film fans alike.
Running from October 17-24, 2024 with screenings at Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg and Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park.
NightTide Magazine 
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