Esclavo de Mí
2022 · 6m · España
Directed by Mario Herbón
Genres: drama, surrealism, thriller
Juan is delighted because he has a date with the girl he likes, but everything turns into a nightmare when his own mind plays a trick on him; how long would you last without asking for help when you have an enemy very close, when the enemy is yourself?
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A date-turned-mindbender that actually commits to the bit—no winking, no apology for letting the protagonist's psyche eat itself alive. Most shorts about self-sabotage are too clever by half; this one just watches a guy get demolished by his own worst impulses and doesn't look away.
Herbón trades in the surrealist vocabulary we know from Lynch and Buñuel, but the execution feels more exercise than invention—competent in its dream logic and tonal control, though the interior-monologue framework sits well-worn by now.
The real move here is how the sound design splinters before the image does; you hear the mind breaking first, which forces the edit rhythm to chase it. That asymmetry between audio collapse and visual hold is what makes the budget constraints feel like aesthetic choice rather than limitation.