The Door
2021 · 12m · China
Directed by Hetong Zhang
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Officer Liu, the only member of a police rescue team to survive a zombie attack at an apartment complex, recounts the operation under interrogation — but the evidence his superiors present keeps contradicting his version of events.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The unreliable narrator bit gets a lot of play, but Zhang uses it to actually interrogate memory and institutional power rather than just yanking the rug out for kicks—which somehow makes the twist *more* subversive, not less.
A formally disciplined interrogation room chamber piece that inherits from *Rashomon* and modern prestige thriller grammar; the way Zhang orchestrates contradiction through evidence and testimony shows a director thinking carefully about how cinema constructs truth.
The real lift here is the decision to keep the zombie attack entirely off-screen and let the officer's fractured recounting do all the work—it's a constraint that forces every ounce of tension into performance and dialogue, turning a 12-minute budget into something that feels architecturally complete.
Reviews
This looks good enough to be a full-length film. It's told in an interesting way with the flashbacks, and you don't really know the whole story until the end.