Writer: Alejandro Amenábar

Alejandro Amenabar writes his own films and also composes most of their scores, which is a rare combination and gives him control over how the withheld information is paced.

The Others is built entirely on a situation the audience is not told, and unlike most such films it rewards a second viewing because the script never cheats. Open Your Eyes does something similar with identity and was remade as Vanilla Sky.

The Sea Inside, about Ramon Sampedro’s right-to-die case, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and is the one with no genre mechanism at all.