El bosque negro
2014 · 15m · España
Directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo
Genres: adventure, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, mythic, theatrical
Sir Héctor, a brave knight with armour and steed, sets out to enter the impious Black Forest to free a beautiful maiden held by a terrible ogre, where others have succumbed to horror and death.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a straight medieval quest narrative dressed up in gore and shadow—exactly the kind of reverential fantasy that usually makes me check my phone, except Alijo actually weaponizes the genre's own vocabulary against itself, turning the ogre's lair into something genuinely uncanny instead of just dark.
A disciplined formal exercise in mythopoeic cinema: the film understands its lineage—Bresson's austerity, del Toro's grotesquerie—and uses that knowledge to construct something architecturally precise, where every theatrical gesture and cut serves the film's meditation on valor and monstrosity.
The decision to hold on Héctor's face in absolute stillness during the descent—no swelling score, no cutting away—transforms a stock hero's journey into something intimate and shattering, and that single refusal to manipulate is what makes the horror land.