Thesis

Ángela is writing a thesis on violence in cinema in Madrid when she finds a tape in the university archive: the murder on it is real. The question the film asks is less who filmed it than why she keeps watching. Alejandro Amenábar made his first feature at twenty-three, co-writing with Mateo Gil. The film argues about the voyeurism of horror and snuff through its own form, which makes the audience complicit. Casting Ana Torrent was not incidental. Torrent was the small girl watching a monster on a screen in The Spirit of the Beehive in 1973; here she is an adult looking at a screen again, and the film uses that memory. It won seven prizes at the 1997 Goya Awards, including Best Film and Best Original Screenplay, and grossed 134 million pesetas in Spain. Who it is for: thriller viewers open to a film thinking about its own genre. Who it is not for: anyone expecting to see the violence. The film shows almost nothing and builds its tension out of sound, which some will find slow.