Parallelism
2018 · 11m · España
Directed by Carlos Cobos Aroca
Genres: horror, mystery, surrealism
Surrounded by an abyssal forest, the Hotel Parallel hides two young people who, innocently searching for a camera, sink into its depths among shadows and strange events.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The hotel-as-labyrinth premise is well-trodden enough that Aroca needs to do something genuinely perverse with it, and instead the surrealism feels like window dressing—competent but safe, which is the death knell for weird cinema.
Aroca constructs a formally disciplined descent into dread, where the forest-hotel becomes a legible space of symbolic constraint; the editing rhythms and shadow work place this squarely in a lineage of European Gothic immersion that rewards close formal attention.
The decision to keep the camera search—the ostensible plot—as almost incidental to the atmosphere is smart, but the film doesn't quite commit to that abstraction; a leaner edit and one decisive sound design choice away from genuinely unsettling.