A través del ocaso
2009 · 11m · España
Directed by Javier Yáñez Sanz
Genres: drama, historical, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
Gévaudan province, France, 1920: a young man wounded by a bullet flees into the depths of a forest, pursued by a hunter, and finds his only escape from the human threats at the end of the dusk.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A wounded-man-in-forest chase sounds like every other prestige thriller, except Sanz commits to something genuinely unsettling about the ambiguity of predator and prey, and doesn't blink when the forest itself becomes the only honest actor—most scouts would've cheapened it with clarity.
Sanz positions this squarely in the lineage of European art-thriller cinema—the formal restraint, the refusal to overdetermine motive, the dusk as both setting and thematic variable—and executes with the kind of considered pacing that respects both the viewer's intelligence and the genre's own formal traditions.
The genius move is what Sanz withholds: there's a single moment where the sound design abandons the human struggle entirely and lets only wind and footfall remain, and that choice—that decision to strip rather than amplify—transforms a conventional chase into something claustrophobic and mythic on a clearly modest budget.