Be Happy
2014 · 19m · España
Directed by Javier Chavanel
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
Journalism student Alejandra spends the weekend at her father's house to study and relax, and discovers he is not the loving, understanding man she believed — he is a dangerous killer of girls.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be transgressive—dad's a secret killer, family horror, all that—but it lands exactly where you'd expect it to, playing the revelation straight instead of doing anything genuinely unsettling with the discovery.
Chavanel constructs a methodical slow-burn in the domestic-thriller tradition, with clear lineage to Hitchcock's tension-through-ordinary-spaces, though the execution doesn't quite achieve the formal control that would make it memorable alongside the genre's best.
The real work here is in how the film chooses to reveal the father through Alejandra's perception—not a monologue or obvious clue, but the accumulated weight of small behavioral details and silences that recontextualize every prior scene, which is a genuinely elegant structural choice on a tight budget.