Las Tres Ciudades
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by PEDRO NAVARRETE
Tones: dark, provocative
An alien spaceship threatens to destroy the three cities on Earth that it considers responsible for all of humanity's evils.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
An alien tribunal judges humanity through its worst cities—it's absurdist geopolitical horror that refuses to pick a lane, and that refusal is exactly why it works. Most scouts would hedge the premise into safe territory; Navarrete leans into the provocation and lets it breathe.
The film's formal restraint—holding the threat in abstraction rather than spectacle—positions it within a lineage of speculative cinema that trusts conceptual weight over visual excess, though the three-city structure risks underdeveloping what could be thematically richer.
There's a single decision here—whether to show the cities as real locations or symbolic voids—that determines whether this lands as genuine critique or empty provocation, and Navarrete's choice in that moment is what separates this from a dozen other alien-judgment shorts.