Edificio Ural
2013 · 19m · España
Directed by José Fontes, Miguel Tejerina
On his first day as a security guard at the Ural Building, Álex expects a quiet night and instead becomes trapped in a nightmare inside a building that is anything but ordinary.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A security guard's first shift becomes a recursive hall-of-mirrors descent—the premise sounds like boilerplate horror until you realize the building itself is the antagonist, and the film gleefully refuses to explain *why*. This is the kind of subversive nightmare logic that makes conventional genre predictability look embarrassingly safe.
Fontes and Tejerina construct a formally disciplined chamber piece that dialogues with the long lineage of architectural horror, from Kafka to contemporary European genre cinema, using spatial blocking and escalating visual grammar to trap both character and viewer with precision.
The decision to make the building's interior logic impossible—corridors that shouldn't connect, scales that shift—without resorting to obvious VFX trickery creates a mounting dread that feels tactile rather than computed, elevating what could be a student exercise into something genuinely unsettling on a measured budget.