Tercero B
2002 · 18m · España
Directed by José Mari Goenaga
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
A woman entrusts her belongings to a stranger while she goes into the sea for a swim, but when she comes out the stranger has disappeared with everything.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A heist premise so stripped down it's almost boring—until you realize the real subversion is that there's no twist, no moral redemption, just a woman and the void where her life was. Goenaga refuses the comfort of explanation.
Economical in structure and deliberately austere in its staging, this film sits comfortably in the lineage of European minimalist cinema—the kind of controlled, unsentimental theft narrative that recalls both Bresson and the Dardennes brothers.
The genius move here is treating the vanishing stranger as a dead fact rather than a mystery to solve; Goenaga holds on the woman's expression at the shoreline long enough that we feel the specific weight of that one choice—to stay present with loss instead of pivot to chase.