Nexo
2016 · 18m · México
Directed by Esbeín Liévano
Genres: drama, mystery, thriller
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tense
Santiago is a young cyclist who has an accident one day. He wakes up with amnesia and meets Manuel, a country man who helps him recover. Little by little Santiago begins to notice very strange situations that make him wonder what is really happening.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A cyclist wakes up with amnesia in rural Colombia and reality starts glitching around him—it's *Mulholland Drive* meets magical realism, except the film commits fully to the vertigo and doesn't blink. The premise sounds like every other unreliable-narrator thriller until you realize Liévano is deconstructing the whole genre from the inside.
Liévano constructs a formally precise puzzle box that echoes the dreamlogic of mid-aughts European cinema while maintaining strict visual discipline; the editing rhythm accelerates the ontological unease without surrendering control, making the surrealism feel considered rather than decorative.
The singular masterstroke is the sound design—Liévano layers a low, almost subsonic hum that intensifies whenever Santiago notices an inconsistency, which means the audience hears the film's unreliability before we see it, turning a modest premise into something genuinely disorienting on a shoestring.