Vae Victis
2017 · 12m · España
Directed by Fran Porras
Genres: historical, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, provocative, tense
Two legionaries ride with news from Rome. On the way they come across a Hispanic family and decide to stop to satisfy their most primitive instincts; but this strange clan, far from being the harmless family they expected, hides a very macabre secret, and the legionaries' luck will change forever.
Picked by Felix
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Vae Victis flips the colonial power fantasy inside out—you're waiting for the conquest narrative and instead get a clan that weaponizes Rome's own assumptions about dominance, turning a historical thriller into something genuinely unsettling and subversive.
Porras constructs this as a precise inversion of the imperial encounter film, with formal control over pacing and genre expectation that situates it within a lineage of revisionist historical horror—the kind of formally aware intervention programmers respect.
The single choice that makes this work is the decision to play the family reveal straight rather than comedic; that tonal commitment, sustained across 12 minutes with minimal budget, transforms what could've been a gimmick into genuine dread.