El Juego de Mary
2025 · 7m · España
Directed by Carlos Mera
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
Marcos, Cristian and Elena are three friends spending the afternoon together, until they suddenly decide to investigate Elena's grandfather's old storeroom — without knowing that such an innocent action will bring malign consequences.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent jump-scare machine that mistakes creeping into grandpa's basement for genuine transgression — the subversion angle is there (innocence curdling into consequence) but the execution plays it so straight it cancels itself out.
Mera understands the grammar of gothic intrusion narratives, and the film sits comfortably in a lineage stretching from Poltergeist to contemporary elevated horror; the spatial grammar of the storeroom-as-threshold is formally considered, even if the payoff doesn't quite earn its setup.
There's a single editing choice in the descent sequence — a cut that holds just long enough to let dread accumulate before the reveal — that suggests Mera knows exactly where the pressure points are; that precision with timing and restraint is what lifts this from straight genre exercise into something that lingers.