Perturbado
1993 · 11m · España
Directed by Santiago Segura
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
An asocial psychopath so obsessed with sex that he relates everything he sees to sexual organs and behaviour one night murders a sensual woman, after which psychiatrists try to cure his obsession.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1993 Spanish film that treats a psychopath's fractured sexuality not as a moral lesson but as a genuine perceptual architecture — psychiatry becomes the real obscenity here, the state's failed attempt to normalize the abnormal. Most scouts would sanitize this into a crime procedural; Segura leans into the discomfort and makes it the entire point.
Segura positions himself within a European tradition of psychological realism that resists sensationalism through formal precision; the film's restraint in depicting violence speaks to a lineage from Haneke and Kieślowski that values what's NOT shown. The clinical framing of psychiatric intervention becomes the film's own formal argument about representation and complicity.
The decision to filter the killer's internal monologue through the psychiatrists' theoretical frameworks rather than direct access — making us overhear rather than inhabit — creates a vertiginous distance that 11 minutes shouldn't be able to sustain; it's that structural choice that makes the whole apparatus turn inward.