Running Lorena
2004 · 10m · España
Directed by José Talavera
Genres: mystery, surrealism, thriller
A young woman walks the solitary streets of Toledo at night when she believes someone is following her and begins to flee through the narrowest alleys of the old town. Her encounters with strange characters turn the race into a mysterious game of appearances.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Running Lorena wants to be a chase thriller but keeps pulling the rug out—strangers become stage players, Toledo's alleys become a labyrinth that doesn't obey logic—and just when you think it's settling into genre, it pivots into something closer to a fever dream. Honestly more interested in *why* it refuses to commit to the scare than in the scare itself.
Talavera constructs a formally sophisticated study in spatial disorientation and shifting narrative contracts, where the old town's architecture becomes both maze and mirror; the film's deliberate withholding of easy genre resolution sits squarely in a lineage of European art-cinema thrillers that prize mystery over revelation.
The real engine here is the sound design—how the ambience shifts from realistic street noise into something abstracted and dreamlike, which is what sells the tonal pivot from genuine menace into surreal game-play without a single expository line.