La habitación
2015 · 14m · España
Directed by Diego H. Kataryniuk Di Costanzo
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
In a post-apocalyptic world, survival depends on courage and food, but also on not losing one's humanity. Alex and Julia are two survivors living hidden in their house with their baby, Dani, kept alive by silence and isolation each night when evil comes out to feed; food will unleash a series of events leading them to decide between themselves or their loved ones.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Post-apocalyptic survival thriller with a baby? Sounds like every other dystopian reluctant-hero story—except Kataryniuk buries the genre under claustrophobia and moral rot, refusing the catharsis most filmmakers can't help but smuggle in. It's genuinely perverse in how little it lets you off the hook.
A compact exercise in tension through spatial constraint and nocturnal dread that recalls both Carpenter's minimalism and the European arthouse tradition of domestic apocalypse; the editing choices around when to show and when to withhold escalation suggest a director fluent in how silence functions as narrative tool.
The entire film hinges on one choice—keeping Dani silent, kept alive only through stillness—and Kataryniuk commits so completely to that visual and sonic discipline that a 14-minute short about three people in a room becomes suffocating. That restraint, that singular decision to build everything on absence rather than action, is what makes it work.