La colleja
2019 · 5m · España
Directed by Sergio Morcillo
At a playground, a father distracted by his phone and his ex-wife loses sight of his son, and when he thinks he has found him he makes the costliest mistake of his life.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the dead-child twist ending, which means Morcillo's real move—making us complicit in the father's distraction before pulling the rug out—is almost boring in its inevitability; the subversion died the moment phone-scrolling became shorthand for parental failure.
A taut five-minute exercise in tension and misdirection that situates itself squarely in the contemporary thriller lineage, with clean editing and a constructed crescendo that recalls the formal discipline of festival-circuit shorts, though it doesn't quite transcend its own machinery.
The genius here is the sound design in the final moment—that specific *absence* of a child's voice where we expect it—which transforms a premise that could've been heavy-handed into something that lands in the gut; it's the kind of sonic decision that makes a five-minute short feel inevitable.