Downunder
2017 · 20m · España
Directed by Fernando González Gómez
Tones: melancholic, tense
Daniel, a family father, is heading to the town of Tenant. It is 1981 in the American southwest; the sun beats down and takes its toll on the old family Chevy, and Daniel is stranded at the side of a road in a sea of earth where very few cars pass and it is not advisable to travel alone.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent desert-stranding thriller, but it doesn't *want* to be subversive enough—the premise plays it safe, trading genuine strangeness for mood and heat. Give me a film that actually breaks the form instead of just inhabiting it grimly.
González Gómez demonstrates formal discipline in his pacing and visual composition; the film situates itself squarely in the American road-thriller lineage with measured editing and a respect for the landscape as character. It's the work of a filmmaker thinking through genre architecture.
The decision to keep us locked inside the failing Chevy—using the car's mechanical breakdown as both literal plot and psychological pressure—transforms what could be a generic survival scenario into something claustrophobic and intimate on a shoestring budget.