Duelo
2021 · 9m · España
Directed by Elena Román, Pablo Cuervo
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
A woman returns home as every day after work, but before entering she receives a call that will change her life, and at the funeral of her loved one she will live a nightmare in which she tries to escape death.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like grief-by-numbers until you realize the funeral itself becomes the horror—most directors would've played it straight, but Román and Cuervo seem to be asking whether mourning is just a waking nightmare we all survive, which is genuinely unsettling in a way that doesn't announce itself.
There's a formal intelligence here in collapsing the threshold between the quotidian (coming home from work) and the surreal (the funeral dreamscape), a structure that echoes expressionist cinema's use of distortion as emotional truth, executed with compositional restraint.
The sound design choice—how the call interrupts the everyday threshold and bleeds into the funeral sequence—is what holds this together; it's the hinge that turns a simple melodrama premise into something spatially and temporally disorienting on a shoestring.