El Cinturón
2022 · 11m · España
Directed by Bruno Marín
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A young man drives to a lonely gas station in the middle of the night, his tank almost empty. Soon he realises that something is off — and this feeling will stay with him for the rest of the ride.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A gas-station-dread setup that feels like it's been done to death, except Marín refuses to pay off the genre contract—the real horror is just the weight of arriving nowhere, which is either brilliantly austere or aggressively boring depending on your patience for mood over incident.
Marín positions this within a lineage of Hitchcockian tension and the contemplative Mexican cinema of the '90s, building unease through restraint and framing; the formal control is evident, though the film's refusal of narrative resolution asks whether atmosphere alone sustains the form.
That decision to keep the threat abstract—to let the dread live entirely in the protagonist's perception and the editing rhythm between the road and his face—is the single choice that transforms what could've been rote genre exercise into something genuinely unsettling on a budget.