Las bestias
2015 · 12m · España
Directed by Marco Huertas
Genres: fantasy, horror, thriller
On a summer night, dozens of wild animals sow chaos in a residential neighbourhood of Barcelona, and a group of police officers must rescue a baby trapped in a house with a large carnivore.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A police thriller that ditches the procedural playbook entirely and replaces it with feral absurdism — wild animals flooding a Barcelona suburb like a fever dream nobody signed up for. It's the kind of premise that makes you squint at the logline twice, which is exactly when you know something's working.
Huertas demonstrates formal control in how he sustains tension across genre registers, moving between the tactical specificity of a rescue operation and the dreamlike transgression of the animal incursion, a tonal negotiation that recalls the European fantastic tradition.
The decision to keep the carnivore mostly unseen until the critical moment — letting the *idea* of it carry the dread — is what separates this from a straightforward creature feature; that restraint on a 12-minute runtime is the whole architecture.