Carne de cañón
2019 · 11m · España
Directed by Pablo loza
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
Fired, indebted, and about to become a father and be evicted, Alex turns to robbery to get money — until one of his robberies goes wrong.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent crime-desperation territory, sure, but there's nothing here that makes me lean forward—the premise is exactly what a thousand other shorts are doing, and Loza doesn't seem interested in interrogating or upending the genre so much as executing it cleanly.
Formally assured within the thriller-realist tradition, with taut pacing and a clear dramatic architecture; the kind of well-made short that sits comfortably in the lineage of Spanish social-crisis cinema without reshaping it.
What elevates this past another broke-guy-turns-criminal story is the precision of the moment when the robbery fractures—there's a specific choice in how Loza cuts away or holds on the face when it all collapses that transforms desperation into something genuinely tragic, and that single decision carries the whole 11 minutes.