Una Noche Cualquiera
2016 · 11m · España
Directed by Daniel De la Cruz
Tones: contemplative, tense
Cristina goes running at night through a residential area, stops in front of a house and receives an uncomfortable phone call, while Miguel and his wife Carmen return home from a political party event.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be a thriller but plays it so straight—parallel narratives, mounting dread, the obvious collision waiting to happen—that it becomes exactly the kind of competent-but-predictable exercise that makes me reach for something weirder.
De la Cruz's split-screen tension recalls the formal rigor of Haneke or early Koreeda, where spatial composition and editing rhythm do the heavy lifting; the film's restraint—what it *doesn't* show—positions it firmly in a lineage of European minimalist drama that trusts the viewer's dread.
The uncomfortable phone call is the hinge, but what makes it work is the sound design's refusal to let us hear Cristina's voice clearly—that single choice of muffling her half of the conversation transforms a stock thriller moment into something genuinely unsettling and economical.