A Sola Firma
2017 · 10m · Argentina
Directed by Manuel Pérez Mora
Tones: contemplative, tense
Nacho and Camila live conflictively in the house of their recently deceased grandfather, and the arrival of their cousin Augusto awakens their suspicions: he must want something.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a competent inheritance-drama setup, but the suspicion angle doesn't subvert the form enough—we've seen the wary cousin gambit a dozen times, and Pérez Mora plays it fairly straight. Where's the formal rug-pull that would make this genuinely unsettling?
The tension between domestic claustrophobia and the mystery of Augusto's arrival sits firmly in a lineage of Latin American chamber dramas—think early Cuarón—and the 10-minute constraint forces a precision in editing and performance that honors that tradition without genuflecting to it.
The decision to keep Augusto's actual motivations ambiguous until the final moments, and to let the camera linger on the siblings' micro-expressions of doubt rather than exposition, does the heavy lifting here—it transforms a genre premise into something psychologically precise on a modest scale.