De Baja
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Hugo Lorenzo
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Antonio is enjoying a fake sick leave from work, gaming online with a colleague, when an unknown player joins their match and changes both men's destinies.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A three-minute film about two guys gaming that somehow pivots into something genuinely unsettling—the kind of tonal swerve that should feel cheap but doesn't, which means Lorenzo's doing something most 'serious' filmmakers are too timid to attempt.
The interplay between online performance and offline consequence recalls a lineage of digital-age anxiety narratives, though De Baja's restraint in execution—what it chooses not to explain—marks a departure from the genre's tendency toward explicit revelation.
The entire film hinges on the moment the third player appears: no exposition dump, no telegraphing, just a presence that recalibrates everything we thought we were watching, and that economy of storytelling—trusting the audience to feel the shift before understanding it—is the decision that makes this work.