Director Agustí Villaronga's third theatrical film, following 1986’s In a Glass Cage and 1989’s Moon Child, began in 1996. He reveals in the ten-minute 2018 interview that is one of the bonus features of this release that it was not originally a feature but the pilot of a proposed television series. When financial difficulties doomed the project, he refashioned it as a big-screen release. That perhaps explains the narrative’s clumsy structure, which abruptly drops plot threads and never manages to tie up loose ends.
The film compensates, however, with a strong atmosphere, thanks not only to Villaronga’s contribution but to cinematography by the now well-known Javier Aguirresarobe (The Others, The Twilight Saga, Thor: Ragnarok) and music by Javier Navarrete, who went on to win an Oscar nomination for his score for Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. He also collaborated on the script with Lourdes Iglesias and Jesús Regueira.
María Barranco stars as Lara, who hosts a radio talk-in program dealing with paranormal phenomena on the titular station. When she receives a package of materials informing her of the horrible death of Victor (Gustavo Salmerón), a gay man who was also the father of her infant son, she investigates how he was impaled, naked, on an iron cemetery gate in Jimena—something the authorities dismissed as an accident.
The evidence suggests that his death was connected to work on a form of psychophony in which voices and blurred images can be discerned in the static of television signals; Victor had become convinced that these were not apparitions of the dead, but projections of living persons experiencing altered states of consciousness. It further indicates that he died while testing his theory in an abandoned rural house near the cemetery.
Taking a room with a local sculptor (Simón Andreu), she contacts the house’s owner (Ángel de Andrés López, who refuses her request to see the place, but learns that his mother (Terele Pávez) had discovered human remains there pointing to a gruesome history.
She also is drawn into a fraught relationship between a local farmer (Juan Márquez) and his jealous girlfriend (Ruth Gabriel). As the story proceeds, the paranormal element—particularly in terms of psychophony—recedes into the background, but the level of violence and gore increases.
Villaronga attempts to tie together the various elements into a satisfying conclusion, but even he concedes that he was not entirely successful, and 99.9 remains more compelling in its parts than as a whole. It does, however, contain some chilling scenes, and this release presents a new 2K transfer and bonus features that include not only the Villaronga interview but a “making of” featurette (19 min.), as well as a trailer and an isolated track of Navarette’s score. A strong optional purchase for public library shelves, especially for film collections in Spanish cinema and/or horror.
Discover more titles for your film collection in our list of horror movies.