Manticore (Spanish: Mantícora) is 2022 psychological drama thriller film written and directed by Carlos Vermut, and starring Nacho Sánchez and Zoe Stein.

An international co-production between Spain and Estonia that blends elements of mumblecore with tragedy and deals with its protagonist's hamartia,[1] the film's storyline follows the romantic relationship between a video game designer (Sánchez) and an art history student (Stein), with the former hoping to find happiness with the latter and thus to subdue his recently awakened pedophilic impulses.

Julián has a bad sex experience with a girl he meets in a bar and begins to develop acute interest in Cristian's physical features.

With human NPC templates from his work and from a hand-drawn sketch of the boy, Julián starts to reproduce Cristian in the VR, becoming aroused in the process.

He rents a new apartment on the outskirts of Madrid where he performs a rim job on Diana, who gets the news of her father's sudden death.

The screenplay was penned by Vermut,[5] in part as an adaptation of classic werewolf films on the premise that they originally sought to depict "humans managing forbidden sexual desires", with motivation for the project coming from approaching the theme of pedophilia as a curse and portraying how a pedophile may try to "cheat" on those forbidden impulses with proxies such as VR or a look-alike of a child.

[4][23] Distributed in Spain by BTeam Pictures,[15] the film was originally due to be released theatrically in Spanish cinemas on 4 November 2022.

[26] Shelagh Rowan-Legg of ScreenAnarchy described Manticore as "brutal, unflinching, precise, and sensitive", adding that she could not but be in "equal parts horrified and mesmerized" with the story.

[28] Raquel Hernández Luján of HobbyConsolas awarded the film 75 points ('good'), writing that Vermut delivers "a disconcerting film at times, suffocating at others, in which you never know what might happen and you are permanently on guard", and adding that a "very intelligent" mise-en-scène helps to "demonstrate that it is not necessary to be excessively explicit in order to enter into the most obsessive, deep and disconcerting corners of people".

[33] Wendy Ide of ScreenDaily proclaimed the film to be "a provocative and intelligently handled picture which explores the impact of isolation and social dislocation on a troubled soul".