Cuatro minutos
2017 · 7m · España
Directed by Carlos Barrantes
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
A man wakes lost inside a small storage room of a few square metres, with no memory of arrival and no way out. A note on the floor marks the start of a game.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a locked-room premise dressed as horror, but Barrantes seems more interested in the architecture of escalating dread than cheap jump scares—the real subversion is how *quiet* the surrealism gets, which half the audience will find insufferable and the other half will argue about for years.
The film locates itself deliberately in the lineage of Beckett and Polanski's minimalist confinement narratives, with precise editorial control that lets each discovered rule of the game reframe the space itself—technically restrained in a way that demands festival discourse.
What lifts this above generic puzzle-box horror is Barrantes's decision to keep the camera almost static, making every small object the man finds or moves become a punctuation mark of mounting panic—it's a formal choice that turns a seven-minute premise into something that *feels* inescapable.