Ride or Die
2025 · 10m
Directed by Liliana Tandon
Two inseparable best friends attend an engagement party, where one makes a disturbing discovery about the other. As she helps her friend contain the situation before anyone else notices, their loyalty and boundaries are pushed to the limit.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise promises transgression but settles into a fairly conventional moral quandary—two friends, a secret, loyalty tested. It's competent tension, sure, but it's the same beat every indie thriller reaches for, and Tandon doesn't seem interested in breaking the contract.
A tightly constructed chamber piece that understands the grammar of suspense and social performance; the engagement party setting becomes a pressure cooker with real formal intelligence, and the editing rhythm between exterior poise and interior horror suggests a filmmaker conscious of her debts to Chabrol and modern psychological drama.
The reveal works because Tandon commits to shooting it entirely through the discovering friend's micro-expressions—no cutaways, no dramatic music cues, just the small collapse of a face—and that single choice of restraint transforms what could've been melodrama into something genuinely unsettling and human.