El invitado
2019 · 10m · España
Directed by Pedro Díaz
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
Marta and David, a couple of killers who kidnap their victims and lock them up until they starve to death, believe they have landed the score that will let them retire — until their latest victim changes the plan.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A couple of serial killers waiting for their victim to die of starvation is bleak enough, but the film's real move is letting the victim actually change their minds—inverting the hostage thriller into something genuinely unsettling about desire and complicity that most audiences won't see coming.
Díaz demonstrates formal control in a tightly wound chamber piece that evokes both the Spanish thriller tradition and the moral ambiguity of recent European crime cinema, though the tonal balance between tension and comedy demands precise calibration that not all viewers will accept.
The decision to play most of the film in a single location with the three characters' shifting power dynamics hinges entirely on restraint—Díaz pulls it off by letting long silences and small behavioral choices do the work that exposition or flashback would ruin.