La Cabina (The Phone Box) is a 1972 Spanish made-for-TV horror/dark comedy short film about a mysterious phone box installed in the middle of a park where an unassuming man gets trapped after the door closes behind him. Unable to exit the box, the desperately pleads for help to any passerby, but no-one can free him. After hours inside (and whith a gawking crowd laughing at his predicament), the crewmen from the phone company arrive to take the box away, still with the man inside.
This short film became notable for winning the 1973 International Emmy Award for Fiction, the only Spanish programme to have won it, and for causing most Spanish viewers at the time to become scared of phone boxes, to the extent that the country’s major phone company had to commision some commercials with the movie's lead actor (who had done commercials for them before, including one where he briefly thinks he is trapped in a similar phone box!
) to show the public that the boxes where safe.note Still, you never know...
Tropes:
- Downer Ending: The film's infamous ending might be one of the most nihilistic ever put to film. [[spoiler: The truck carrying the phone box reaches its final destination, a large mountain complex, with the man still trapped inside the box. The box is brought to a large underground area where the man discovers, to his horror, that there are hundreds of phone boxes with the decaying remains of other men trapped inside them. And the phone company gets away with it, setting up another phone box in the same plaza and preparing it for the next unsuspecting victim.
- Driven to Suicide: While being transported to the phone company's HQ, the man spots another truck carrying a similar phone box with another middle-aged man trapped inside it. The two attempt communication but can't hear each other. Later on, when the truck arrives at the underground facility full of phone boxes with dead men inside them, the protagonist turns around and sees a familiar corpse. The other man, still trapped, had committed suicide by strangling himself with the phone cord.
- From Bad to Worse: The protagonist has the worst day of his life. First, he gets trapped inside the phone box. The various attempts to rescue him go nowhere. His neighbours treat the ordeal like a circus. And to top it all off, he's taken to the HQ of the phone company, which turns out to be a surreal facility used for storing phone boxes containing the corpses of other trapped individuals. To make matters even worse, his son will never see him again.
- Humans Are Bastards: A crowd gathers to witness the man's plight after he gets trapped in the phone box. While some of them attempt to break him free, the rest of the crowd, children included, find the situation funny.
- Riddle for the Ages: Why was the phone company imprisoning people in phone boxes?
- The Voiceless: This is what becomes of the protagonist once his horrific ordeal begins. Since everything is filmed outside the box we can hear the other characters' dialogue but not his.
