La cabina
1972 · 34m · España
Directed by Antonio Mercero
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
A man becomes trapped inside a telephone box; what begins as a minor mishap slowly turns into an unsettling, terrifying ordeal that drives him to boundless anguish and despair.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone sees a claustrophobic nightmare; I see Mercero refusing the easy catharsis—no escape, no explanation, just a man unmade by geometry and indifference, which is genuinely more unsettling than any jump scare could be.
A masterwork of formal constraint: the telephone box becomes a perfect frame for examining how cinema traps us alongside the protagonist, and Mercero's command of duration, sound design, and the single location recalls the rigor of early Polanski or Roeg—this is the kind of short programmers still argue about fifty years later.
The decision to hold on the protagonist's face as the box closes—refusing cuts to the crowd, the street, anywhere—transforms a premise that could be gimmicky into something suffocating and real, and that commitment to his subjective space is what makes every minute count.