Into the mud
2016 · 10m · España
Directed by Pablo Pastor
A young woman wakes up naked in the middle of a forest; wounded, she discovers her aggressor, a hunter who will not easily let his new prey escape.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like a horror checklist—naked woman, forest, hunter—but Pastor refuses the usual cathartic revenge turn, which is either gutsy or frustrating depending on your mood; I'm still deciding.
A clean exercise in survival-thriller grammar, with echoes of Peckinpah's predator-prey framing, though the film doesn't quite find its own formal argument beyond the setup.
The choice to keep the camera close and claustrophobic on the woman's body—never letting us see the landscape clearly—transforms what could've been a standard chase into something visceral and disorienting; that decision carries the whole ten minutes.