Triple Room
2017 · 15m · España
Directed by Cristina Trenas, Isabel Delclaux
Genres: adventure, comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Three lifelong friends embark on an adventure to discover rural China. They find themselves lost in the middle of nowhere, cut off, uncomfortable and immersed in a situation that is not what they expected.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like every other "fish out of water in Asia" setup, but the film's refusal to resolve into either comedy or drama—letting both sit uncomfortably together—suggests Trenas and Delclaux are more interested in undermining expectations than satisfying them.
A formally composed study in displacement that acknowledges its debt to both the anthropological documentary tradition and the buddy-comedy form, executed with the kind of restrained editing that trusts silence to do narrative work.
The film's entire architecture hinges on a single tonal choice—playing the trio's genuine bewilderment not as punchline or crisis, but as a held breath—and that decision is what transforms what could have been a conventional travel narrative into something genuinely unsettling.