Lucas en formol
2002 · 11m · España
Directed by Rafa Piqueras
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
A young pregnant woman run over by a car loses the baby she was expecting, only to discover later that the foetus is being used as a fetish object in the obsession of one of the doctors who treated her that day.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most scouts would run from a premise this grotesque—a doctor's necrophilic obsession with a stillborn—but that's exactly why Piqueras is onto something. It's the kind of film that makes you furious and complicit at once, subverting the medical-thriller formula into something genuinely transgressive and unsettling.
Piqueras positions this within the lineage of body-horror and provocation cinema—Cronenberg, Tsukamoto—but the restraint in execution, the formalist distance maintained even as the premise screams for sensationalism, suggests a filmmaker aware of how transgression becomes cheap without rigor.
The decision to keep the baby offscreen—to let the psychological violation carry the weight rather than spectacle—is what transforms a lurid premise into something that actually haunts; it's a single formal choice that separates exploitation from genuine unease.