Pisanka
2022 · 16m · España
Directed by Jorge Yúdice
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
Two friends who have not seen each other in years meet in a café, but before they can catch up, one must warn the other about a threatening presence only she can see, standing right behind her friend.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a high-concept mindbender, but it plays it frustratingly straight—the invisible threat, the mounting dread, all textbook thriller beats that don't interrogate *why* we're watching two people spiral in a café instead of actually doing something about it.
Yúdice demonstrates formal control in the spatial grammar of the film—how the camera positions us as complicit third party, the editing rhythm that mirrors psychological fracture—though the execution sits somewhere between Polanski homage and undergraduate horror workshop without quite finding its own argument.
The entire film pivots on a single recurring shot choice: the camera stays locked on the friend who *can't* see the threat, forcing us to read danger only through her reaction, which is a brutal and elegant constraint that does all the heavy lifting.