General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Tesis

Tesis (Thesis) is a 1996 Spanish thriller directed by Alejandro Amenábar, his first feature film, about a film student who discovers what appears to be a real snuff movie, a recording of an actual murder made for the film, in her university's video library.¹ Shot largely in black and white at the Faculties of Information Sciences and Pharmacy of the Complutense University of Madrid, it won seven Goya Awards in 1997, including Best Film, Best New Director, and Best Original Screenplay, and is regarded as a turning point for the popularity of the thriller genre in Spain.²^•¹

Key fact	Detail
Director and debut	First feature of Alejandro Amenábar, then 23 years old and still an unfinished student at the Facultad de Ciencias de la Información¹^•³
Release	11 April 1996 in Spain (some press reports give 12 April); premiered in the Panorama section of the Berlinale in early 1996⁴^•⁵
Runtime	126 minutes per the ICAA catalog; 125 minutes per the Film Society of Lincoln Center⁴^•¹
Cast	Ana Torrent (Ángela), Fele Martínez (Chema), Eduardo Noriega (Bosco)⁶
Awards	Seven Goya Awards in 1997: Best Film, Best New Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best New Actor, Best Production Direction, Best Editing, and Best Sound⁷
Economics	Budget of 696,000 euros; about 2.6 million euros gross and 855,853 spectators in Spain⁵^•⁴
Production	Produced by José Luis Cuerda through Las Producciones del Escorpión; filmed 21 August to 27 September 1995 in Madrid on 35 mm Fujicolor⁸^•⁹

Spoilers

Plot

Ángela (Ana Torrent) is an audiovisual communication student preparing a thesis on audiovisual violence. Her thesis advisor, Professor Figueroa (Miguel Picazo), agrees to search the faculty's video library for the most extreme material she needs, but the next day he is found dead in a screening room.¹⁰ Ángela takes the tape that was in the machine and, with Chema (Fele Martínez), a classmate and obsessive collector of gore and pornographic video, watches it: it appears to be an authentic snuff movie, and the woman killed in it is a fellow student who disappeared years earlier.¹¹

The two investigate, and Ángela also meets Bosco (Eduardo Noriega), a strange young man who had been a close friend of the murdered woman.¹² The investigation turns dangerous: Ángela realizes she has been chosen to play the lead in a future snuff film, and she comes to suspect that a network producing and distributing such tapes operates inside her own faculty, involving students and professors.¹¹^•¹³ The film's famous opening line, spoken by Ángela to a video camera, is "Me llamo Ángela. Me van a matar" ("My name is Ángela. They are going to kill me").⁵

Production

Origin. Amenábar, born in Santiago de Chile in 1972, had made the short films La cabeza (1991), Himenóptero (1993), and Luna (1994) on Video 8 before writing Tesis.¹⁴ He passed the screenplay to producer José Luis Cuerda, who three days later told him he would set up a new production company, Las Producciones del Escorpión, a cooperative-style firm created to make films by newcomers, with Julio Madurga, Ricardo Steinberg, and Emiliano Otegui involved; the project went ahead with economies such as halving the department heads' salaries.¹⁵^•⁸

Shoot. The film was shot during the summer of 1995, from 21 August to 27 September, mainly in the Facultad de Ciencias de la Información where Amenábar studied, in the corridors of the Pharmacy faculty, and in a chalet; Amenábar has described the schedule as five and a half weeks.⁹^•⁵ Hans Burmann was the director of photography, María Elena Sáinz de Rozas the editor, and Wolfgang Burmann the production designer; Amenábar composed the score himself, with Mateo Gil credited for the story and Amenábar for the screenplay.⁹^•⁴ Amenábar later explained a technical quirk of the shoot: because the film shows video monitors, someone decided to film at 25 frames per second although it would be projected at 24, which makes the film about five minutes longer than intended.⁵

Reception and awards

The film was both a commercial and critical success in Spain, grossing about 2.6 million euros from roughly 855,000 spectators against a budget of 696,000 euros.⁵^•⁴ At the 1997 Goya Awards it competed in eight categories, including Best Actress for Ana Torrent, and won seven: Best Film, Best New Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best New Actor (Fele Martínez), Best Production Direction, Best Editing, and Best Sound.⁵^•⁷ It also won the Audience Prize at the 1996 Biennial of Spanish Cinema in Annecy, Best Film at the 1997 Forqué Awards, Best Actress at the Granados Film Festival, and Best European Fantasy Film at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival in 1998.⁷ Despite these honors, the film never received a proper U.S. theatrical release.¹

Themes and critical reading

Amenábar has described the snuff-movie premise as a kind of McGuffin: the film is really about the treatment of violence on television and about the image in general, both the beautiful image and the terrifying one whose extreme case would be the snuff film.¹⁵ Academic readings have developed this point. Jason E. Klodt, a scholar of Spanish cinema, argues that the film uses the voyeurism inherent in watching film to problematize the spectator's gaze: the protagonists maintain a facade of analytical distance toward violent images while their gazes betray obsessions that eventually transform them from spectators into perpetrators, and the film itself projects a sensationalized violence that makes its own audience a consumer of violent spectacle.¹⁶ Santiago Juan-Navarro, professor at Florida International University, calls Tesis Amenábar's most explicitly metacinematic work, a thriller about thrillers that parallels Ángela's academic inquiry with the viewer's own spectatorial experience.¹⁷ Barry Jordan, in a Manchester University Press book chapter, notes the film's debt to Hollywood suspense storytelling and to the voyeurism of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window and Psycho and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.⁸ The Rotterdam festival program placed it in the lineage of Peeping Tom, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and the darker side of Hitchcock.¹¹

Amenábar has said the snuff phenomenon was treated as an urban legend, and that the film grew from a television landscape saturated with reality crime stories such as the Alcácer case.⁵^•¹⁸

Legacy and restoration

The film is credited with marking a turning point in the popularity of the noir genre in Spain and with establishing the career of its director, who went on to make Abre los ojos (1997) and The Others (2001).²^•¹ After the Goya ceremony on 25 January 1997, press legend holds that VHS copies of the film sold out in the Vips store chain.⁵ For the film's 30th anniversary in 2026, Amenábar began a remastering to correct the frame-rate mismatch, add 5.1 sound, and remove one shot; a restored copy with newly remastered sound had its world premiere at the Sitges Film Festival in the Sitges Clàssics section.⁵^•¹² The Film Society of Lincoln Center gave the film its U.S. theatrical premiere in New York the same year.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Psychological horror films › Psychological horror films, 1990s and 2000s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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