Mi criaturita
2022 · 16m · España
Directed by Álvaro Laguna
Genres: drama, fantasy, horror
A couple living quietly in a forest cabin have their peace shattered when the woman brings home the fetus of a strange creature that awakens her long-repressed maternal instinct.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a body-horror meditation on motherhood, which is exactly why it works — Laguna doesn't flinch from the grotesque, but he also doesn't wink at it, and that refusal to pick a lane is genuinely unsettling.
The film's restraint in a 16-minute runtime shows considerable discipline; the cabin setting and two-person chamber-piece structure recall a lineage of folk horror and intimate genre work, executed with formal control that lets the surrealism breathe rather than shout.
The key move is Laguna's decision to shoot the creature itself in soft, almost vulnerable light—that single tonal choice reframes the entire film from exploitation into something genuinely tender and strange, which is why it lands where so many creature films fail.