Mi estrella
2019 · 12m · España
Directed by Sergio Barba
Genres: drama, horror, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Alfonso wakes tied hand and foot, gagged and blindfolded, fighting to free himself when he discovers he is locked inside a tiny cell.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is pure sensory lockdown—total confinement, zero exposition—but it leans hard into genre convention rather than subverting it; I'd expect Barba to push harder against the thriller machinery he's assembled.
A formally disciplined exercise in constraint and escalation, situated squarely in the lineage of minimalist thriller craft; the editing discipline and tonal control show a director thinking seriously about economy of means.
Barba's choice to keep the camera intimate with Alfonso's body—breathing, struggling, the small physics of resistance—turns a box-and-blindfold scenario into something visceral that bigger budgets miss; that tactile commitment to the protagonist's sensations is what makes the confinement actually land.