MIA
2020 · 8m · España
Directed by Marco Castaño
Genres: drama, mystery, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Mia is a young woman who has become the obsession of an unseen third person, who narrates her story over the course of a couple's dinner.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Everyone expects the obsessed third party to be a creep with a camera; Castaño makes them a narrator at a stranger's dinner table, which is somehow more unsettling and completely sideways from the thriller playbook. It's the kind of structural swerve that shouldn't work but does, and it'll piss off people who want their stalker narratives straight.
The film's formal restraint—letting tension build through voiceover and domestic staging rather than visual spectacle—places it in conversation with the psychological thriller tradition, though its dinner-party frame echoes a more literary, chamber-piece sensibility that feels deliberately at odds with genre convention.
The decision to keep the obsessor unseen and purely vocal transforms what could be stock surveillance material into something claustrophobic and intimate; that single formal choice—making presence felt through absence and voice—is what elevates an 8-minute short into something that lingers.