El bosque del silencio
2019 · 10m · España
Directed by Pedro Pacheco Arlandi
Genres: horror, surrealism, thriller
Eleven-year-old Julián gets lost in the forest while playing with friends who have vanished, and a strange presence hunts him through the ruins where he hides — until he wakes in a 1980s religion classroom, alone with the teacher.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A film that commits to the bit—horror in a forest, then *surprise*, you're in a classroom, and the real dread has been something else entirely. Most scouts would call that a twist; Felix calls it subversion, and Arlandi executes it with enough weirdness that you can't quite dismiss it as gimmick.
The formal architecture here is deliberate: a forest sequence that borrows from folk horror and surrealist cinema, interrupted by institutional dread in the classroom. The editing rhythm between worlds feels considered, situating itself in a lineage of Latin American magical-realist cinema that takes its craft seriously.
That transition—the moment the dream breaks and we're in the classroom—hinges on a single tonal shift in sound design and framing that recontextualizes everything. One choice, cleanly executed, that transforms a ten-minute budget into something that feels intentional and unsettling rather than confused.