La noche dentro
2023 · 24m · España
Directed by Antonio Cuesta
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Belén, a young nurse, wakes up after being attacked. She is accused of ending the life of a child after giving him medicine, but she claims she injected the right medication and that she can prove it.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a locked-room accusation thriller that actually *believes* in its premise instead of subverting it—which is either disappointingly straight or genuinely refreshing depending on whether Cuesta's restraint is discipline or caution, and I'm still not sure which.
Cuesta situates this firmly in the tradition of European legal/medical thrillers—think Haneke's procedural rigor—where the film's formal authority (measured pacing, controlled mise-en-scène) becomes inseparable from the question of who we trust; the craft *is* the argument.
The whole film hinges on how Cuesta lets the camera rest on Belén during cross-examination—that single choice of when to cut versus when to hold determines whether this is generic procedural or something that trusts the audience to read doubt in stillness.