Destroy Madrid
2016 · 9m · España
Directed by Joseba Alfaro
Genres: action, sci-fi, thriller
In Madrid in 2030, in a world devastated by the confrontation between states and their citizens, a member of the resistance holds a device that could end the war and must flee the drones guarding the city.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's competent sci-fi action porn with all the expected beats—resistance, MacGuffin, drones chasing—but there's nothing here that makes you reconsider what a dystopian thriller can *be*. Alfaro's playing it straight when the premise begs for subversion.
A formally disciplined exercise in contemporary genre craft, with clear debts to the Bourne lineage and a Madrid setting that gives it geographic specificity; the editing maintains propulsive tension, though it doesn't quite interrogate its own action-movie grammar the way the best post-2010 thrillers do.
That decision to hold the camera on the protagonist's face during the device handoff—cutting dialogue entirely and letting physicality and breath do the storytelling—is the move that transforms a routine chase into something with actual stakes and intimacy on a nine-minute budget.