Thesis

Thesis (Tesis, 1996) is a Spanish thriller you can watch online on iFILM. Ángela, a film student in Madrid, is writing her dissertation on on-screen violence. To gather material, she asks her faculty advisor to dig out the most extreme footage the archive holds.

He drops dead in the screening room — and a videotape is left behind in his office. What's on it is real: a snuff recording of a girl being tortured to death. Ángela recognizes the victim as a student who vanished from her own department, which means whoever made the tape walks the same hallways she does. Two classmates get pulled into her digging: Chema (Fele Martínez), a gore-obsessed loner, and Bosco (Eduardo Noriega), a charmer she's drawn to far too much to trust.

This was Alejandro Amenábar's debut feature, shot at twenty-three, years before The Others and his Oscar-winning The Sea Inside; it swept seven Goya Awards. The film is uncomfortably honest, asking why we're drawn to other people's suffering and catching the viewer in the same curiosity as its heroine. A smart, ruthless pick for horror fans who want an idea under the dread. Stream Thesis (1996) online on iFILM.