La morgue
2014 · 20m · España
Directed by Sergio González-Román
Genres: horror, surrealism, thriller
When Mónica enters a cafeteria one morning she does not imagine that, in a few instants, the clients and their strange way of acting will convert the situation into an authentic bad dream that will oblige her to reveal that darkest part of her interior.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A cafeteria horror film that uses everyday mundanity as a trap for psychological unraveling—most scouts would dismiss this as gimmick, but González-Román treats the surreal incursion with the deadpan commitment of someone who actually believes a coffee shop can become a fever dream. It's exactly the kind of premise that shouldn't work and absolutely does.
The film's restraint in staging and its deliberate refusal to explain the uncanny presence of its extras situates it in a lineage of European body-horror and existential dread; there's craft in what González-Román withholds, though the surrealist vocabulary occasionally outpaces the formal rigor needed to anchor such ambition.
The single choice that makes this work is the camera's unwavering stillness while the background actors move with unsettling synchronicity—it's a decision that costs nothing but attention, and it transforms a low-budget location into something genuinely disorienting by simply refusing to cut or flinch.