Rayos gammatrónicos
2012 · 10m · España
Directed by Jon Rivero
Genres: experimental, sci-fi, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, surreal, theatrical
A theatre group performs inside a house, but when one actress steps into the street stairwell, strange gammatronic rays create space-time paradoxes along her path.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A theatre troupe performing inside a house that fractures into sci-fi paradox the moment someone hits the stairwell—it's the kind of premise that makes you genuinely unsure what genre you're watching, and that's exactly the point. Rivero's doing something genuinely subversive here: treating surrealism and theatrical abstraction as scientific phenomena, which is backwards enough to feel dangerous.
The film situates itself within a lineage of experimental theatre-cinema hybrids, though the execution of the paradox sequences feels more gestural than rigorously considered; the formal tension between domestic realism and gammatronic abstraction is where it stakes its claim, even if the editing doesn't quite crystallize the spatial logic into the kind of precision this premise demands.
The decision to shoot the theatre group's performance in real-time, static wide shots, then fracture that stability the moment the actress moves beyond the house's threshold—that formal break is what sells the concept and makes the budget constraints feel intentional rather than limiting.