400 km
2014 · 20m · España
Directed by Miquel Casals
Genres: crime, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Karen is a young psychologist who after going through a strong and hard personal blow tries to redo her life; she has seen her working day reduced to very few hours so she cannot afford to pay the rent, and she will decide to accept a somewhat risky but quick and very well paid job, transporting a small stash of cocaine 400 kilometres; but to her surprise, Marc, the boy who will take her to her destination, is a former patient of her consultation.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A psychologist smuggling coke to her former patient—that's the kind of premise that makes you genuinely unsure which character you're rooting for, and Casals refuses to let you off the hook with easy moral scaffolding. Most scouts would see 'crime drama' and move on; this is exactly the subversive collision of intimacy and risk that consensus taste misses.
Casals situates this in the lineage of European social realism meeting noir—the formal precision required to sustain ethical ambiguity across 20 minutes, where every conversation beat carries the weight of professional transgression. The restraint here is curatorial: tension built through what remains unsaid between doctor and patient.
The film's engine is the single recurring choice to keep the psychology alive even inside the crime—every exchange between Karen and Marc crackles because Casals treats their former professional relationship as the *active* problem, not just the setup. That decision to make therapy the real terrain transforms a low-budget road movie into something architecturally tight.