BATMAN: First Night
2023 · 22m · España
Directed by David Conesa
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Bruce Wayne, tormented for 14 years since his parents were shot dead in a Gotham alley, has promised to clean the city of corruption when he is ready. On the night before he goes out to deliver justice, his butler Alfred tries to stop him in an attempt to save his life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a Batman origin story—the thing everyone's already made—except Conesa strips away the costume spectacle and just sits with the psychological rupture between intention and consequence, which is genuinely unsettling in its refusal to mythologize.
The film's real architecture lives in the Alfred-Bruce dynamic and how Conesa channels that through a single, fraught night; it's formally restrained in the best tradition of character-driven threshold narratives, where the smallest gesture—a gesture refused—becomes the entire moral argument.
Conesa makes the decisive choice to photograph most of this in shadow and ambient light rather than dramatic angles, and that constraint forces the performances into radical interiority—you're reading everything from breath and posture, which is exactly how you make 22 minutes feel consequential on no budget.