Sus primeros pasos

The scouts

The missing child thriller is basically Netflix preset until del Moral decides to keep the camera fixed on the parents' faces — no cutaways to search, no dramatic reveals, just two people slowly realizing they're alone — and suddenly the whole genre collapses into something that actually unsettles.

A restrained chamber piece that inherits from Haneke's methodical dread; the formal discipline of staying with Jorge and María's dawning horror, rather than indulging in the machinery of suspense, positions this squarely in a lineage of minimalist European cinema that trusts silence.

The entire film hinges on that first moment when one of them says the child's name — not as alarm, but as a question — and you realize del Moral is betting everything on the micro-hesitation before panic sets in, a single beat that reframes three minutes of ordinary domesticity into something irreversible.