El ladrón de caras
2013 · 12m · España
Directed by Jaime Maestro Sellés
Genres: crime, mystery, thriller
Detective Paul F. Gimbal helps a mysterious young woman who was cruelly attacked and investigates a powerful, elusive face thief who wants to destroy everything.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A face thief as antagonist is exactly the kind of premise that sounds ridiculous until you realize it's a perfect metaphor for identity erasure, and Sellés leans into that weirdness instead of apologizing for it—this is thriller syntax deployed for something genuinely unsettling.
Technically assured within the crime-thriller lineage, though the fantastical conceit (a literal face thief) sits uneasily between genre convention and symbolic abstraction, never quite committing to either tradition with full rigor.
The decision to make the threat abstract and metaphysical rather than literal—a face thief who isn't just a killer but something ontologically uncanny—does the heavy lifting that elevates a modest premise into something that justifies every frame of its twelve minutes.