Ahora no puedo
2011 · 12m · España
Directed by Roser Aguilar
A young actress attends a casting while caring for her baby in the waiting room because her partner claims to be working, and a series of unsettling events follows.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a domestic-horror gut-punch, but it mostly trades in obvious dread—watching a woman get gaslit into anxiety isn't subversive, it's just competent frustration.
Aguilar understands the formal language of contemporary Spanish cinema: the waiting room as purgatory, the phone as a tether—but the film doesn't quite resist its own melodrama enough to leave room for ambiguity.
That opening choice—keeping the baby in the frame, a constant low hum of need while the audition happens offscreen—does all the heavy lifting; it's the single decision that makes the entire power dynamic legible without a word of exposition.