Animal within
2012 · 9m · España , México
Directed by Jaime Fidalgo
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
In a luxury hotel suite, a young student discovers with his own eyes the dark venture of a sinister man and is drawn towards the monster.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A hotel-room psychodrama dressed in genre clothes—it wants to be transgressive but settles for moody and observational, which is actually fine if you're okay with horror that's more about watching than rupture.
Fidalgo's 9 minutes sit comfortably in the psychological-thriller lineage of confined-space cinema, with measured pacing and the formal discipline of a student work that knows its tradition and executes within it.
The film's real architecture lives in its refusal to cut away—the sustained gaze on the protagonist's dawning complicity transforms a simple voyeurism premise into something morally textured, and that compositional commitment is what elevates the modest scenario.