Vampiro
2016 · 20m · España
Directed by Alex Montoya
Tones: contemplative, dark
The roads around Valencia are dotted with women looking for clients. A screenwriter picks one of them up to research his new work: he is not looking for a body, but for a story.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The transaction of buying a story instead of a body could've been preachy, but Montoya refuses the sermon—this is too slippery, too aware of its own complicity to let anyone off the hook, and that's exactly the kind of moral ambiguity that makes me actually believe in it.
Vampiro sits in a precise lineage of European social realist cinema that interrogates the gaze itself: the film knows exactly how it's positioning us, how the screenwriter's extraction mirrors our own spectatorship, and that formal self-awareness is where the real discipline lives.
The choice to stay in the car, to let the conversation become the entire mise-en-scène rather than cut to streets or backstory, transforms what could be exploitation into something almost unbearably intimate—one location, two voices, and suddenly you're trapped with the weight of it.