Leo grooms himself, leaves the house, happy, straight to an appointment. He leads and sings a song by Julio Iglesias. But when he arrives at his destination everything turns sordid. The girl he’s dating, Carolina, is only 16 years old. She is scared and trapped. Leo has met her on the internet, he has lied about her making her believe that hers was also her minor and then he has blackmailed her to force her to stay in a secluded park.
The first 20 minutes of La desconocida do not leave the viewer indifferent, who experiences Carolina’s situation with anguish. Then things change, but up to here it can be read because Pablo Maqueda, director of the film competing in the official section of the Malaga Festival, knows that he has shot a disturbing thriller with an unexpected ending and wants to avoid spoilers at all costs.
The stranger addresses the so-called grooming, the cyberbullying of minors that is “a terrifying reality in which adults pose as adolescents to deceive girls and then take them to parks far from the city to sexually abuse them,” explains Maqueda in an interview with La Vanguardia. “They are blackmailed and it’s a terrifying reality, because a 15-year-old girl is easy prey for online predators,” she adds.
Maqueda relates that “there is more and more police control over grooming, but it is still something widespread, which is in all neighborhoods, that is why the action of the film is located in a working-class area of ??Madrid, any man, with a family ordinary, he can carry that darkness inside him”. A darkness that causes horror: “The stranger is based on a play by Paco Becerra. I went to see it and I was impressed by the faces of the audience when they saw that uncomfortable and twisted story.”
The play “was a face-to-face between the two characters in a park, it was very synthetic and for the film adaptation we have completed that universe, everything is narrated, the film visualizes the darkness of the characters” to which they give life Laia Manzanares and Manolo Solo. An adaptation that has a lot to do with meta-cinematography, because although it may seem unusual, Leo, the stalker, talks to Carolina, the victim, about the films that have had the greatest impact on him: “his knowledge of cinema is the tool Leo uses to present himself in the network before the girls as someone very smart,” says Maqueda.
“In addition, the cinema is the alibi he uses to hide his atrocities from his wife,” adds the director. Because every night, Leo locks himself in his office and goes online to cajole the minors, but he tells his wife that he’s watching movies. She laments the lack of physical activity of her husband: “Cinema makes you fat, they should warn you like they do with tobacco,” laments the woman, played by Eva Llorach.
For Maqueda, “it was important that the film speak of cinema as a mask of representation.” And the thing is that the director is a pro movie buff who goes to theaters every day to see something “and if one day I don’t show up, I’m very sad.” It’s like that since I was a child. His references are many and varied, from Michael Haneke to David Fincher. To shoot his previous work, the documentary Dear Werner, he traveled 750 kilometers between Munich and Paris to emulate Werner Herzog. La desconocida is his first fiction feature film and it has premiered in style, competing for the Biznaga de Oro at this Malaga Festival, which is now entering the final stretch.
