El descenso
2011 · 15m · España
Directed by Daniel Romero
Tones: contemplative, tense
After running out of petrol, Blanca and Susana must cross a desert road on foot, where extreme exhaustion, suffocating heat and an unsettling context strain their relationship and awaken their survival instinct.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Two women dying in the desert is basically the setup everyone expects, but Romero seems content to just… let it happen, without the usual genre pirouettes or twist that would justify the attention—sometimes the contrarian move is admitting a premise doesn't need rescuing.
The film's disciplined restraint and formal attention to landscape-as-pressure recalls a lineage of European minimalism, where the frame itself becomes the antagonist; Romero situates this squarely in that tradition of crisis-as-formal-problem.
The decision to keep the camera at ground level—physically exhausted, never pulling back for perspective—transforms what could be generic survival into something claustrophobic and intimate; that one compositional choice does all the work.