La Ilustración
2021 · 19m · España
Directed by Álvaro Gabarrón Lucas
Genres: horror, surrealism, thriller
Carla wakes one night to unsettling knocks outside her room and, after entering the bathroom, feels something trying to enter her body; from then on a shadow pursues and controls her, and even a simple drawing may haunt her for life.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Lucas gets it—body horror that doesn't rely on gore, instead letting surrealism do the philosophical heavy lifting; a premise that sounds like possession but feels like something weirder and way less forgivable.
The formal restraint here is immaculate: a 19-minute descent into psychological dissolution that understands how Polanski and early Lynch built dread through negative space and sound design, situating itself squarely in the lineage of intimate supernatural transgression.
That choice to make the shadow felt rather than seen, let it exist in the gaps between Carla and the frame itself—that single formal constraint transforms what could be a generic haunting into something claustrophobic and genuinely unsettling on a micro-budget.