Void Chair
2016 · 8m · España
Directed by Xavier Miralles
Genres: horror, mystery, thriller
A girl returns home in the middle of the night and finds a mysterious rocking chair in one of the streets. Drawn by curiosity, she approaches to touch and rock it, and that small gesture awakens something disturbing.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A cursed rocking chair in the street is basically Folklore 101—the premise does the heavy lifting and the execution just confirms what we already suspect. Miralles isn't interested in subverting the haunted-object template, which means there's nothing here to genuinely unsettle a contrarian.
The film's restraint and formal precision—the way it stages the encounter as pure cinematic ritual, letting negative space and sound design carry the dread—situates it squarely in the European art-horror lineage, though it doesn't quite achieve the conceptual depth of its influences.
That moment when she first *rocks* the chair and the sound design splits into something wrong—a subtle desynchronization between the creak and the visual rhythm—is the entire film, and it's enough: Miralles commits to making the audience feel the wrongness through one precise acoustic choice rather than explanation or spectacle.