El Escondite Inglés
2022 · 15m · España
Directed by Sergio Martínez
Genres: coming-of-age, horror, thriller
Erika can't take it any longer: at school they pick on her and at home her parents are very strict. An urban legend about the children's game 'El escondite inglés' could make her life change — but everything has a price.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Takes a playground game and weaponizes it into something genuinely unhinged — the kind of premise that sounds ridiculous until you realize the film *commits* to it completely, turning childhood folklore into a real bargain-with-the-devil scenario that most scouts would've soft-pedaled into metaphor.
Sergio Martinez situates this squarely in the lineage of folkloric horror (Candyman, urban legend cinema), and the film's structural restraint—letting the game's rules do the narrative work rather than overexplaining—shows real awareness of how horror operates through implication and form.
The choice to make the game's logic *visually literal* rather than suggestive—every rule becomes a constraint, every frame tightens around Erika until the surrealism isn't decorative but inevitable—is the kind of formal decision that makes a 15-minute budget feel like the film was built exactly as it needed to be.