El Semblante
2022 · 15m · Spain
Directed by Carlos Moriana, Raúl Cerezo
Genres: historical, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
Spain, 1692: a Holy Inquisition torturer obsessed with capturing the purest face of pain has his engineer build a new device, El Semblante, ready to be tested on someone close to him.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this torture-porn historicity, and they're half right—but Moriana and Cerezo are actually interested in something weirder: the obsessive aesthetics of pain itself, which is philosophically unhinged in ways most horror shorts are too timid to touch.
A formally precise descent into the Inquisition's mechanized cruelty that understands its lineage to both Renaissance art-obsession and modern body-horror; the geometry of the device and the framing work in concert to make abstraction unbearable.
The decision to hold on the torturer's face—watching him watch the device, rather than showing us what it does—is the entire film, and it's the kind of restraint that costs nothing and changes everything.