El juego
2019 · 11m
Directed by Juan G. Rodríguez
Genres: drama, LGBTQ+, thriller
At Christmas, Sasha celebrates her birthday with her girlfriend Lucía; when Lucía receives a call from her lover, Sasha proposes a strange game that turns into a nightmare.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a relationship thriller, which is fine, but Rodríguez doesn't seem interested in subverting the genre—he just executes it competently, and competence is the enemy of memorable film.
A taut chamber drama with genuine formal control: the mise-en-scène tightens as the emotional stakes mount, and the editing respects the slow-burn architecture of betrayal and power play that recalls the best of Almodóvar's intimate cruelties.
What makes this work is the sound design—the way phone calls bleed into the room's silence, collapsing Lucía's interior world and the game's stakes into one suffocating space; that single sonic choice transforms a familiar dynamic into something genuinely claustrophobic on a shoestring budget.