De otro lado
2020 · 30m · España
Directed by Bruno Marín
Genres: dark comedy, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
Enrique is a therapist specialising in couples' problems, but in his thirty years of career he had never encountered a problem like the one his two new patients, Laura and Iván, tell him during a session. What starts out seeming like a joke gradually turns into something darker and more disturbing.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A therapist film that refuses the expected catharsis—instead of healing, we get escalation into something genuinely unsettling that most programmers would shuffle past as 'too dark.' Marín's willingness to let the joke curdle into genuine disturbance is exactly the kind of subversive restraint that makes consensus uncomfortable.
The film demonstrates careful command of tonal modulation, moving from the recognizable language of therapy-room drama into something more formally destabilizing; it knows its debt to the psychological thriller tradition while refusing to service its reassurances.
The genius move here is structural rather than flashy—Marín's decision to let the session itself become the only container, trusting the dialogue and the actors' microexpressions to do the heavy lifting instead of cutting away, transforms a thirty-minute runtime into something claustrophobic and precise.