The Buzz
2020 · 7m · Brasil
Directed by Antonella Nicolino
Genres: experimental, horror, thriller
Locked in his apartment during quarantine, a man's only links to the outside are his television and telephone. When the television fails and the calls turn strange, he is surrounded by a maddening nothing.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A quarantine thriller that actually uses isolation as *existential vertigo* rather than just a setting — the television failure and the morphing calls create a premise most scouts would've softened into conventional dread, but Nicolino leans into the surreal nothing and doesn't blink.
Nicolino's sound design and editing rhythm situate this squarely in the lineage of Polanski's apartment anxiety and contemporary experimental horror, with each formal choice — the television's dissolution, the telephone's acoustic distortion — working in deliberate conversation with that tradition.
The decision to let the *sound* of the calls become increasingly abstracted rather than clarifying them is what transforms this from a pandemic-era short into something genuinely disorienting; one sound choice that reshapes the entire perceptual space.