Hermanas
2019 · 12m · España
Directed by Carlos Marbán
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
Trasmoz, 1969: after her husband's suicide, Cristina becomes obsessed with the idea that one of her two daughters practises witchcraft and may have had something to do with his death, and decides to eradicate the evil she believes nests inside her.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be transgressive—maternal horror, folk superstition, a woman unraveling—but it plays it too straight, too reverential toward its own darkness; a shame, because a truly subversive take on this material would've interrogated the hysteria rather than inhabit it.
Marbán locates this psychological descent within a specific historical moment and visual grammar that recalls Spanish horror cinema's interrogation of shame and feminine transgression; the formal control—how it lets dread accumulate through restraint rather than spectacle—marks a filmmaker thinking deliberately about his lineage.
What elevates this beyond period-piece tragedy is the decision to keep the daughters almost opaque, letting Cristina's certainty become the only reliable narrator; that structural choice—trusting ambiguity over exposition—transforms a 12-minute runtime into something that genuinely unsettles.