El pez plomo
2013 · 15m · España
Directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo
Genres: fantasy, horror, mystery
A sceptical marine biology student travels to a remote fishing village intending to study a strange fish called 'El pez plomo'. There, unwittingly, he becomes involved in a macabre tale of sirens.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The setup looks like a straightforward cryptozoology mystery—until the sirens show up and it pivots into something genuinely unsettling, refusing the neat rationalist resolution you'd expect from a 'sceptical student' frame; that's the kind of genre rug-pull that actually earns itself.
Alijo situates this firmly in the Basque Gothic tradition while dialoguing with maritime folklore cinema—the formal restraint in his editing and the way he lets myth accumulate through dialogue rather than spectacle positions this as serious genre work, the kind that rewards the festival circuit.
The singular choice here is the decision to keep the student's skepticism *active* through the second half rather than abandoning it for conversion or hysteria; that sustained tension between disbelief and mounting dread is what makes the modest scale feel haunted rather than just low-budget.