Hidden Soldier
2010 · 11m · España
Directed by Alejandro Suárez Lozano
Normandy, 1944: soldier Wilson, pursued and out of ammunition in enemy territory, suffers strange interference that plunges him into the violence and madness of a war with an unexpected end.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A WWII soldier film that goes full psychedelic fever dream—the war itself becomes the unreliable narrator, and by the end you're not sure what timeline or reality we're even in. This is the kind of genre sabotage that makes festival programmers squirm, and it's exactly why it works.
Suárez Lozano positions this within the lineage of war-as-surrealism (Jodorowsky, perhaps a touch of Tarkovsky's interrogation of violence), but the execution feels slightly untethered from its own formal intentions—the surrealism overpowers rather than interrogates the historical moment.
The single decision to let the sound design slip into abstraction while the image remains documentary-grounded creates this uncanny vertigo that a bigger budget would've diluted with clarity; it's a $0 effect that costs everything.