Carne
2017 · 14m · España
Directed by Alejandro Marcos
Genres: experimental, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
Lucrecia, played by Lolita Flores, believes that supernatural abilities grant immortality and leave the woman misunderstood by everyone else. Other people appear to Lucrecia as pieces of meat, as raw material.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Carne flips the body horror script entirely—instead of the protagonist being monstrous, everyone *else* becomes meat in her eyes, which is a genuinely twisted inversion that most horror scouts would pass on for being "too uncomfortable" or "unclear." The fact that her supernatural delusion is played dead-straight, never winking, is exactly the kind of subversive premise that shouldn't work but does.
Marcos situates this film in a lineage of Latin American surrealist horror—Jodorowsky's fractured psychology, Zuláwski's bodily obsession—but executes it with restrained formal control that distinguishes it from mere provocation; the visual grammar of flesh and subjective perception feels deliberate rather than exploitative.
The crucial decision is casting Lolita Flores to play Lucrecia with absolute conviction in the delusion, never performing it as madness for the audience—that singular commitment to the character's interior logic is what transforms what could've been shock value into something genuinely unsettling and real.