Unheimlich
2021 · 16m · México
Directed by Fabio Colonna
Genres: fantasy, horror, surrealism
On a rainy night, a girl wakes from a nightmare to find her house transformed into a surreal labyrinth with a sinister creature waiting in the shadows.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's *almost* there—surrealism-meets-creature-feature has legs, sure—but the nightmare-logic premise feels like it's playing it safe, hitting familiar uncanny beats instead of actually *breaking* something open. Colonna's got the visual language; I just wish he trusted it to be weirder.
A formally precise descent into the uncanny that understands its debts to German Expressionism and body-horror lineage without genuflecting; the spatial grammar of the labyrinth transforms mise-en-scène into narrative architecture, and the restraint in how the creature is revealed speaks to a director thinking in frames, not just scares.
The decision to keep the creature mostly *felt* rather than shown—shadow work and suggestion doing the heavy lifting on what looks like a modest budget—is what elevates this past generic nightmare material; there's one sound design choice in the second act that rewires the entire spatial logic of the house, and that's where Colonna's craft becomes undeniable.