“La Cabina” (“The Telephone Box”) is a short Spanish film from 1972 directed by Antonio Mercero and starring José Luis López Vázquez. Vázquez, whose character spends most of the film’s 35 minutes trapped inside a phone booth, plays the un-named “Hombre de la cabina (Man in the Phone Box)”.

I gave up looking for this movie years ago having only read about it. Seemingly endless searches for “La Cabina” returned nothing. I should have known it would eventually resurface on the WWW (and with English subtitles to boot). Thanks to YouTube users MultiChannelZero for sharing the film in its entirety.

In “La Cabina” A Spanish man becomes trapped inside a newly-installed telephone booth, unhappily finding himself the target of more ridicule than sympathy from observers who take conspicuously sadistic delight in his predicament. The telephone itself does not even work (this adds a cynical dash of realism to the film) so the man cannot contact police or rescue workers. Once inside the booth his voice is muted and never heard again, though he can well hear the taunts and entreaties from outside. Authorities eventually arrive but none of that surly troupe can smash the phone booth’s seemingly rocket-proof glass nor can they jimmy open the door. One authority with a large sledge hammer seems to have the best chance of opening the vessel by smashing its roof (at the risk of rendering the man inside a casualty) but as he prepares to strike he is interrupted by the arrival of the people who installed the phone booth. Those individuals take responsibility for the situation. They dismantle the call box from its trappings and spirit it away to parts unknown, sending the trapped man on a metaphor-rich journey through the city of Madrid.

“La Cabina” is an unsettling film of eerie surrealist flourishes and brutal visual ironies. If the film starts out as a comedic riff it does not end as such. The conclusion is not entirely shocking or even unpredictable by today’s standards, but I think most viewers would not see it coming.

It seems, inevitably, that we must compare “La Cabina” to the more recent and better known American film “Phone Booth”, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Colin Ferrell. There are, after all, very few films in which protagonists spend almost their entire time on screen inside a phone booth.

If we must compare the two then there can be no question of “La Cabina’s” superiority. Despite the seemingly uninspiring premise of a full story told from inside a telephone box “La Cabina” actually goes somewhere (unlike “Phone Booth”). The film’s denouement is neither predictable nor cliché, offering no gratuitous morality tale for why this man was chosen for this fate — a cruelly metaphorical indifference which is presumably deliberate. While the risk of delving into self-absorbed wankery is high with this film I think it is fair to say that “La Cabina” leaves more to the imagination and gives viewers more to think about than “Phone Booth”.

A glimmer of the man’s integrity is offered at his moment of reflection on how it was very nearly his young son and not he who got trapped in this booth. That circumstance seemed to offer the man some redemption from an otherwise horrifying state of affairs. Aside from that we learn little about the “Hombre de la cabina” and gain little insight into his character or what he may have done for Fate to have targeted him so. This intentional ambiguity invites viewers to perhaps contemplate their own vulnerability to the randomness of things.