Llévame a otro sitio
2004 · 21m · España
Directed by David Martín de los Santos
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tense
A married couple travelling by car on a lost road crosses paths with a hitchhiker, who suggests to her an idea to probe her husband's hidden desires and try to awaken a relationship that keeps them in emptiness.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A hitchhiker as marital saboteur—that's the kind of premise that makes you lean forward, especially when it's framed as therapy rather than seduction or violence. Martín de los Santos doesn't let you settle into what you think this film is doing, which is exactly why it works.
The film's restraint and formal control—its refusal to let tension collapse into melodrama—positions it thoughtfully within the European art-cinema tradition of conjugal unease, though the hitchhiker gambit feels slightly more provocative than the narrative architecture ultimately allows.
That moment when the wife locks eyes with the hitchhiker in the rear-view mirror—the decision to hold it just past comfort—is where the entire power dynamic of the piece rewires itself, and everything before and after pivots on that single beat of sustained, uncomfortable attention.