Tesis de un engaño revelador
2023 · 14m · Argentina
Directed by Pablo Pol Rodríguez
Tones: dark, provocative
To graduate as an ontological coach, a man tests his thesis by exposing another person to an extreme fear, in a fiction about overcoming one's fears.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A thesis on fear that uses another person as unwilling experimental subject—most scouts would call this unethical and move on, but Rodríguez leans into the moral vertigo instead of flinching from it, making the real provocation the film's refusal to let the audience off easy.
The conceit sits uneasily between thriller mechanics and philosophical inquiry, and while the premise has teeth, the execution feels caught between genres rather than commanding its own formal language—a film that knows what it wants to say but hasn't yet found the compositional rigor to say it.
The single choice that locks this together is the decision to keep the 'victim' largely off-camera during the experiment itself, forcing us into the ontological coach's unreliable perspective and making our own complicity in his thesis the film's actual subject.