Cemento y acero
2022 · 17m · España
Directed by Oriol Villar
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Víctor and Nacho are friends and mafiosi. They have been tortured and chained to a cement block; while Nacho does the impossible to save himself, Víctor tries to find out why their boss has betrayed them. They reflect on their lives and past, and then Nacho decides to make a confession that will change their lives — if they manage to save themselves.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Solid premise—two guys chained to concrete, one fights, one questions—but it lands exactly where you'd expect a crime thriller to land, and that's the problem; the confession twist feels inevitable rather than subversive, which is a missed opportunity for something genuinely unsettling.
Villar demonstrates formal control in the spatial staging of confinement and the measured pacing of revelation, positioning this within the European crime-drama lineage of moral reckoning under duress—the architecture of the piece is deliberate, even if the emotional payload doesn't quite justify the restraint.
The magic here is Villar's choice to make Víctor's investigation—his need to *understand* betrayal—the emotional core rather than Nacho's survival instinct; that single tonal decision transforms what could've been a survival-thriller into something more psychologically precise, and it's earned on a minimal budget through performance specificity alone.