Badlands
2022 · 12m · España
Directed by Gabriel Chicano
Eli, a young girl crossing the badlands, is stranded when her car breaks down; after walking for a long time with hope nearly lost, she comes across an SUV towing a caravan, unaware that her life is about to take a 180-degree turn.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like every stranded-girl thriller until that caravan pulls up—and then the film *refuses* to tell you what happens next, which is either gutsy or a cop-out, and I genuinely can't decide which.
Chicano situates this squarely in the American frontier-thriller tradition, but the execution feels slight; there's craft in the tension-building, yet it doesn't quite achieve the formal precision or thematic depth that would anchor it in the lineage it's reaching for.
The film lives or dies on what Chicano does in that single moment when Eli realizes she's not alone—the way the camera holds, or doesn't hold, and whether we trust what we're seeing becomes the entire engine of dread that carries 12 minutes on a shoestring.