Talión
2022 · 13m · España
Directed by José Manuel Meneses, Paco Ríos
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Fifteen years have passed since Sara, Gloria and Aitana suffered a savage rape by a 'pack' of men; in that time, each has continued with her life as best she could. Until a Christmas gathering in Gloria's nightclub forces them to confront again the horror they thought they had overcome.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the revenge thriller to explode into catharsis, but Meneses and Ríos refuse the catharsis entirely—they sit in the unbearable weight of survival instead, which is genuinely more unsettling than any act of violence could be.
The film's formal restraint—how it uses the nightclub space as both refuge and trap, the careful blocking that keeps the three women in perpetual proximity without resolution—places it in a lineage of intimate European trauma cinema that privileges emotional precision over narrative satisfaction.
There's a single choice here that matters: the decision to keep the camera on the women's faces during the recognition moment rather than cut away, letting us watch three separate internal catastrophes happen simultaneously in one frame.