Actos por partes
2023 · 16m · España
Directed by Sergio Milán
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, whimsical
Marta's cancer returns with force. Tired of her luck, she decides to throw in the towel; it will then be when three stories come to her to, from the most unexpected humour, help her rewrite her destiny.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise dangles redemption-through-cosmic-intervention like every Hallmark fever dream, but Milán refuses to land it—instead he lets three impossible stories collide with a woman's surrender and actually *stays* in the wreckage. It's the kind of film that could've been inspirational garbage and somehow isn't.
Milán situates this squarely in a lineage of magical-realist cinema that treats mortality with both gravity and absurdism—there's clear DNA from Erice, perhaps touches of Amenábar—and the formal restraint in how he allows the three narratives to interrupt Marta's trajectory shows real control over tonal register.
The pivot from Marta's surrender into the arrival of the three stories is executed through a single tonal shift—a kind of permission granted by the film itself—and that choice to let whimsy become *load-bearing* rather than decorative is what transforms a cancer narrative into something that actually breathes.