Amateur
2013 · 20m · España
Directed by David Salvochea
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, tense
A black-comedy thriller uncovers the murky double life of an upper-class woman who plays at being a Belle de Jour in provincial Spain.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's got the pulp skeleton of a thriller, sure, but Salvochea seems more interested in playing dress-up with Buñuel than actually subverting anything—the premise wants to shock us, the execution just sort of... winks.
A genuinely cunning reckoning with Belle de Jour's legacy, executing its formal conceit with precision: the film's architecture mirrors its subject's compartmentalized life, each scene a carefully calibrated escalation that respects both the Buñuelian lineage and the noir tradition it's mining.
The real move here is the casting choice—watching an actress navigate the gap between the woman she appears to be and the life she's constructed creates all the tension without needing elaborate setpieces, which is exactly how you make a provincial thriller feel dangerous on minimal means.