Las buenas intenciones
2017 · 14m · Colombia
Directed by Carlos Gaviria Pérez
Genres: coming-of-age, crime, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark
Two young people are recruited by armed groups, in a raw depiction of the grave consequences of violence for the future of the young.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the violence to be the point here—the shock, the moral outrage—but Gaviria does something weirder: he lets the recruitment feel almost bureaucratic, which somehow makes it more unsettling than gore ever could.
A disciplined piece of social realism that knows its lineage—the restraint recalls early Haneke, the formal distance keeping us complicit rather than absolved—and the 14-minute form is respected, not rushed.
The decision to shoot the recruitment scenes with flat, administrative lighting instead of the expressionistic shadows you'd expect completely inverts where your dread comes from; suddenly the machinery of violence becomes visible, and that's the entire film.