La despedida
2017 · 5m · Colombia
Directed by Mateo Stivelberg
Marcos remains isolated in a room because of a strange illness while his wife Julia cares for him. As the virus makes him aggressive, Julia must protect what lies in the next room and make a radical decision to save her own life.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A domestic thriller that *almost* subverts the isolation-plague formula—Julia's agency and the unseen threat next door hint at something stranger than standard horror—but it never quite commits to the weird premise it's dangling, settling instead for a 'radical decision' that feels more predicted than provocative.
Stivelberg demonstrates formal control in the claustrophobic geography and escalating tension, drawing from the lineage of intimate horror-thrillers, though the execution leans toward genre competence rather than the formal innovation that would elevate this to the conversation.
The singular masterstroke here is the architectural choice—keeping the threat in an adjacent, unseen room—which transforms Julia's caregiving into a geometric moral problem; that spatial restraint, deployed across five minutes with minimum resources, is what makes the escalation land.