Máquinas
2014 · 9m · España
Directed by Luis Mata
Tones: contemplative, tense
Carlos and Alfredo are office colleagues; in a work break, Alfredo takes Carlos to a basement in the building to play a game of billiards, and Carlos will try to take advantage of this moment to confess a problem he is having with some strange phone calls…
Picked by Zoe
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A basement billiards confessional sounds like festival circuit comfort food—two guys, one secret, tension by proximity—until you realize Mata is actually playing with the gap between what we're watching and what we're hearing, which is genuinely unsettling in a way most thrillers aren't brave enough to attempt.
The formal restraint here—limiting the frame to a pool table and two figures while the phone calls loom as pure sound design—recalls the économie of Kiarostami or early Haneke, a composed study in how dialogue and silence can weaponize an ordinary space.
What makes this work is the sound design decision to let the phone calls remain abstract, never showing us the caller or the source, so the entire film pivots on performance and the small movements of two men around a pool table—a constraint that transforms a simple premise into something genuinely disquieting.