El Monstruo
2022 · 17m · Colombia
Directed by Gerard Nogueira
Genres: drama, fantasy, horror
Tones: dark, melancholic, tender
In a cabin lost in the woods, Isaac undergoes strange transformations when night falls, while by day his father Aarón tends his wounds and protects him as both accept that Isaac is turning into a monster.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The real subversion here isn't the monster-transformation premise—it's that the film never lets you hate the thing emerging from Isaac, never gives you the cathartic kill. It's a body-horror film that's actually about love, which is exactly the kind of genre sabotage that feels earned rather than clever.
Nogueira locates this in the lineage of intimate European horror—Babadook, A Dark Song—where the monster is syntax for grief, but the formal restraint (those long takes of Aarón's hands, the economy of the night sequences) keeps it from sentimentality and pins it instead to something more austere.
The crucial move is holding on the father's face during Isaac's transformations instead of cutting to the creature itself; that choice—trusting the actor's reaction over spectacle—makes the whole thing about witness and complicity rather than fear, and that single editorial instinct reshapes what could've been conventional into something genuinely unsettling.