Maniquí
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Camilo Caballero Bastidas
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
One night, Jordi arrives at his job cleaning a warehouse and notices a mannequin that was never reported; his superiors know nothing about it either, and when the lights start to fail, the mannequin seems closer every time they come back on.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A mannequin-stalks-cleaner premise sounds like every other haunted-object thing until you realize the real horror is the absolute banality of it—a nothing shift, a nothing job, a nothing object that maybe isn't even there. Subversive without trying too hard.
Caballero Bastidas works in the lineage of slow-burn dread and spatial horror (Polanski, early Ari Aster), where editing rhythm and light failure become syntax; the restraint here is classical, though the premise risks familiarity.
That choice to never confirm the mannequin is *actually* moving—every cut back is a micro-decision about what we believe—and in three minutes on what's probably nothing budget, that ambiguity becomes the entire engine of why we stay tense.