Hostal Orión
2018 · 21m · España
Directed by Jaume Carrió
Tones: contemplative, dark, sensual
Palma, 1984. Marçal is a blind young man who helps his father at the Hostal Orión and feels a peculiar attraction towards Luz, the new employee. When night falls, Marçal has a particular inclination that leads him to roam the corridors in search of the sound stimuli taking place inside the rooms.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A blind man prowling hostel corridors at night, eroticized by sound alone—it's a premise that should feel exploitative or gimmicky, but Carrió flips the power dynamics so completely that voyeurism becomes vulnerability, desire becomes disability as a mode of perception. Most scouts would flinch; that's exactly why this works.
Carrió situates himself within a lineage of European sensory cinema—Bresson's use of sound, Haneke's architectural dread—but the restraint here is genuinely earned, each corridor shot a formal echo of the protagonist's tactile navigation rather than mere style.
The decision to score the film almost entirely through diegetic sound—letting us hear what Marçal hears rather than what we're supposed to feel—transforms a microbudget into something that feels architecturally precise, a complete sensory grammar built on what could have been a gimmick.