Detrás de la puerta
2019 · 10m · Argentina
Directed by Andrés Borghi
Genres: drama, fantasy, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Milagros performs a ritual to speak one last time with her deceased father and ask him a favour, unaware that calling the dead can have terrible consequences.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A grief-stricken daughter summons her dead father to ask a favor—it's premise-wise a familiar séance setup, but Borghi seems genuinely uninterested in twist-shock payoffs, which is either restrained or boring depending on your tolerance for restraint.
Borghi situates this squarely in the Latin American gothic tradition, and the 10-minute runtime functions as formal constraint rather than limitation—each beat of the ritual feels precisely weighted, the contemplative pacing a deliberate rebuke to American horror's need to accelerate.
The entire film hinges on Milagros's performance during the ritual itself—that suspended moment between prayer and dread where the actress holds the audience in uncertainty about whether anything supernatural is actually happening, and that single choice of restraint is what makes the ending land.