De Jigoku
2022 · 7m · Chile
Directed by Luciano Pizanno
After a failed modelling session, she is attacked in the underground parking lot; on returning to the photography studio, she receives a strange message with a promise of vengeance.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A revenge thriller that's sleek enough to look inevitable, but it never quite commits to the perversity that would make it genuinely unsettling—it stays in the genre's safe lane when it could be doing something weirder with the power dynamics.
De Jigoku understands the syntax of contemporary horror—the digital message, the parking garage as threshold—and executes with formal precision, though it doesn't quite add new language to the genre's established grammar.
The film's entire grip lives in the shift from victim to architect of retribution; the specific moment and method of that reversal—how quickly, how coldly, how it arrives—is what separates this from every other assault-revenge short made this year.