Behind
2016 · 15m · España
Directed by Ángel Gómez Hernández
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Arianne, a divorced mother obsessed with the idea of her baby falling into her ex-husband's hands, meets at a children's birthday party an old woman, Leonor, who claims to see a terrifying-looking man attached to her back, and at home suggestion and fear give her a night of authentic nightmare.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a folk-horror mindbender but plays it surprisingly straight—psychological paranoia and literal supernatural terror never quite friction against each other enough to earn the surrealism. It's competent and creepy, sure, but it's the film everyone expects it to be.
Hernández locates this in a lineage of Spanish psychological horror that values atmosphere over mechanics, and the birthday party mise-en-scène recalls a deliberate, controlled unease; the formal restraint is admirable even if the payoff feels inevitable within its tradition.
The single choice that electrifies this—cutting between Arianne's maternal paranoia and Leonor's hallucinatory vision of the figure on her back—creates a doubling effect that makes you unsure whose nightmare you're inhabiting, and that one structural decision transforms what could be rote into something genuinely destabilizing.