Iphigenia’s Night
2017 · 25m · España , Taiwán
Directed by Albert Ventura
Genres: crime, mystery, thriller
Driving home from the airport, Jie meets a police officer who forces him to take a detour down a local road. Driving in the darkness, he runs over an individual wearing a strange uniform and a Greek mask with a message in its mouth from a mysterious organisation: 'Iphigenia's Night'. Jie will have to take part in a dangerous mission if he wants to recover his wife.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A masked corpse with a cryptic message hijacks a man's ordinary night into something genuinely unhinged—it's the kind of genre short that refuses to play by extraction-thriller rules, and the surrealism actually *works* because it never winks at you about how weird it is.
Ventura constructs this with real formal precision: the deliberate pacing of the drive, the rhythm of revelation through constraint, situates itself thoughtfully in the lineage of suspense cinema that trusts darkness and withholding over exposition.
The decision to literalize the threat as a single recurring image—that mask, that message—rather than escalating the external stakes, is what makes the dread accumulate; it's economical filmmaking that understands one repeated element, held long enough, becomes unbearable.