La habitación contigua
2007 · 9m · España
Directed by Daniel Romero, Raúl Garán
Genres: drama, experimental, thriller
Philippe, a young man, agrees to be periodically exposed to a drug in exchange for money; a voice over a loudspeaker in an abandoned warehouse is his only contact with the suppliers of the mysterious substance.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A drug trial as intimate chamber piece—told almost entirely through disembodied voice and a guy alone in an warehouse—is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus programmers nervous, and that's precisely why it works. Romero and Garán refuse the thriller's easy catharsis and leave you staring at the void instead.
The formal restraint here—how much story the directors extract from absence and monotone authority—places it in dialogue with Beckett and early Haneke, a lineage of minimalist terror that demands the viewer complete the cruelty. A technically austere choice that deepens its own ambition.
The genius move is the loudspeaker as sole narrator: that flat, bureaucratic voice creates all the dread without a single cut or score manipulation, and it's that single tonal decision that transforms what could be a gimmick into something genuinely unsettling on a shoestring budget.