Evilio
1992 · 11m · España
Directed by Santiago Segura
Genres: crime, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
A man kidnaps three young women, determined to kill them if he finds they are not good girls and lied to their parents about being at school.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Segura takes the home-invasion thriller and inverts it into something genuinely perverse—the killer isn't punishing crime, he's enforcing a moral code nobody asked for, which means the film's real horror is the logic itself, not the violence. Most scouts would see this as exploitation; I see it as a premise that refuses to let you sit comfortably on either side.
A formally austere exercise in moral entrapment that recalls the Spanish horror tradition's interest in Catholic guilt and transgression, though the execution feels more schematic than interrogative—the premise outpaces the filmmaking's ability to complicate it.
The power move here is Segura's decision to keep the camera mostly static and observational, resisting the urge to sensationalize the premise; that restraint is what makes the psychological perversity land harder than any cut or sound design could on its own.