Apocalipsis
2020 · 20m · Argentina
Directed by Nicolás Iaconis
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
In a degraded and hostile natural environment, two men will face different dangers while carrying the heavy burden of survival. After an unfortunate event, the protagonist must confront himself in the solitude of a ruined world that deeply despises him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Post-apocalypse survival thriller sounds like every other burnt-out landscape meditation, except Iaconis seems genuinely interested in psychological fracture over spectacle—the real threat isn't the hostile world, it's the guy's own unraveling. It's bleak enough to feel earned rather than fashionable.
Iaconis positions this within a lineage of existential cinema—the solitary man confronting both environment and self echoes Bresson and early Haneke—and the 20-minute constraint demands the formal precision that separates this from routine genre exercise.
The film's entire weight hinges on how it stages that internal reckoning after the event: whether through negative space, sound design choices, or a single held look, that pivot from external survival to internal collapse is where Iaconis either nails it or doesn't, and everything suggests he does.