Sonrisa
2018 · 14m · España
Directed by Oscar Andrés
Andrea, a young writer seeking quiet to work, declines a stranger's invitation for coffee, then meets him again in the forest. A friendly conversation turns tense when he cannot accept her rejection.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent stalker-thriller that plays the premise straight—rejection-turned-menace is hardly a subversive discovery, and the forest confrontation lands exactly where you'd expect it to, which is precisely the problem.
Andrés demonstrates clear command of tension and spatial composition, situating the film within a lineage of intimate psychological thrillers; the two-act structure—refusal, then reckoning—echoes Campion and Haneke's economies of dread.
The film's entire architecture hinges on a single choice: the decision to keep the stranger's face half-obscured and his voice unplaceable until the forest scene, which transforms a routine rejection narrative into something genuinely unsettling with minimal resources.