Alicia
2017 · 10m · España
Directed by Daniel M. Caneiro
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Alicia is curled up in the shadows, under the dining-room table, alone and with a large kitchen knife in her hands. Beside her lies the lifeless body of Miguel, her father, and on the floor, next to the corpse, a mobile phone begins to ring: there is still hope.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the aftermath confession or the legal reckoning, but Caneiro just… stays under the table with her, refuses to move, refuses to explain—it's almost boring until you realize that's exactly the point, and the ringing phone becomes this unbearable moral weight that the film never lets you off.
A formally austere chamber piece that recalls the confined-space thrillers of Hitchcock and De Palma, but strips away their baroque machinery; the restraint—shooting mostly in shadow, keeping us crouched in that single domestic geometry—positions this firmly in the lineage of minimalist European crime cinema.
The choice to keep the camera locked beneath that table, making us complicit in the waiting rather than the act, transforms what could be exploitation into something genuinely claustrophobic—and that ringing phone going unanswered becomes the film's entire argument about paralysis and consequence.