Infierno
2018 · 13m · España
Directed by Berta Canivell
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
When Marta is called away by a work emergency in the middle of the night, her husband wakes and wanders the house unable to sleep; a disconcerting phone call with his wife turns the peaceful night into a nightmare.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A phone call thriller that plays it frustratingly straight—the surreal stuff is competent but never genuinely unhinged, and Canivell seems more interested in building dread through conventional means than actually breaking the form open.
Canivell demonstrates assured command of late-night horror syntax and the uncanny domestic space, situating herself clearly within a lineage of intimate psychological terror; the compositional choices in those static interior shots show real formal discipline.
That distortion effect on the voice during the phone call—the way it slides between intimate and otherworldly—transforms what could be a standard night-terror setup into something genuinely destabilizing, and it's such a small choice that everything else pivots around it.