Un mal golpe
2011 · 16m · España
Directed by Xavier Ruax
Genres: dark comedy, drama, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
Lorena dreams that someone attacks her and believes it is a premonition, so she strikes a strange man and, thinking she has killed him, spirals into madness and nerves.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A dream-logic thriller that weaponizes paranoia into a philosophy—Lorena doesn't just spiral, she becomes a case study in how conviction manufactures guilt, and Ruax commits to the absurdity without winking. Most scouts want thrillers to be about what's real; this one's subversive enough to ask whether that distinction matters.
Ruax situates this squarely in the psychological realist tradition—Polanski's anxiety-cinema DNA is evident in the tonal modulation from surrealism to breakdown—but the dark comedy register feels slightly unresolved, as if the film hasn't quite settled which formal language it wants to serve.
The entire architecture hinges on a single cutting choice: the moment Lorena strikes the stranger, the film pivots from dream-state to waking paranoia, and that threshold is where the budget dissolves into something psychologically immense. It's the rhythm of that transition that makes a modest 16 minutes feel claustrophobic and inevitable.