Hiena
2021 · 7m · España
Directed by Brian Lee Arnold
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
A toxic relationship marked by physical and psychological abuse reaches the point where the only two escapes left are to die or to kill.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most domestic abuse narratives genuflect toward catharsis or escape; Hiena locks you in the cage and asks which exit you'd choose—kill or die—which is the kind of premise that makes consensus programmers squirm and is exactly why it works.
Arnold's restraint in the mise-en-scène channels a lineage of intimate psychological horror—the spatial compression recalls Haneke's formal rigor—though the film's resistance to tidy resolution may resist the curatorial appetite for resolved formal arguments.
The sound design choice to let silence do the violence, punctuated by the specificity of breath and movement rather than score, is what elevates this seven minutes beyond its premise and into something that genuinely unsettles on a technical level.