Bestias
2023 · 7m
Directed by V.R. Rao
Genres: horror, surrealism, thriller
A mother hiking in the woods with her son is stalked by a VFX beast that is neither bear nor man, as time and space implode around her and reality itself begins to unravel.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this elevated horror, but Rao's actually doing something weirder—collapsing the distinction between maternal terror and cosmic dread so completely that the 'beast' becomes almost beside the point, which is exactly the kind of genre sabotage that shouldn't work but does.
The formal control here is surgical: the way Rao uses negative space and temporal distortion recalls the body-horror precision of Cronenberg, but filtered through a distinctly contemporary anxiety about protection and powerlessness that feels both formally rigorous and genuinely unnerving.
The decision to keep the creature deliberately ambiguous—neither fully VFX nor fully practical, existing in that uncanny middle ground—is what makes the mother's unraveling feel earned rather than imposed; it's one formal choice that transforms a premise into something that actually haunts.
Reviews
By constraining itself to dread instead of outright horror, Bestias makes itself more difficult to shake off. Besides, its seven-minute runtime does not afford its audience the scope to simplify and domesticate the unease it sets loose.