Alguien debe morir
2024 · 27m · España
Directed by Javier Ruiz Mazarío
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
Pandora, a young woman taking care of her sister, is invited to participate in a strange experiment. Locked in a remote cabin in the woods with three other people, they discover the experiment is a sadistic psychological game: to leave, one of the individuals present must die if the others want to get out alive.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A locked-room death-pact thriller that could've been generic torture porn, but Mazarío treats the premise as a genuine philosophical trap rather than spectacle—the film's real teeth are in watching rational people rationalize the irrational, which is way more disturbing than any gore could be.
Structurally indebted to the chamber-play tradition and survival-game lineage (Cube, Exam), but the film's control over pacing and its refusal to telegraph outcomes suggests a director aware of what those predecessors did and willing to interrogate their assumptions rather than simply replicate them.
The entire film hinges on a single recurring choice: Mazarío cuts away from the moments you expect to see, forcing the audience's complicity into the horror rather than providing release—it's a formal decision that transforms a premise that could've been exploitative into something genuinely unsettling.