Alan
2018 · 22m · España
Directed by Ursula Romero
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Gil intends to divorce his wife Helen, but she asks for one more month together — the time she has left to live — hoping their son Alan can recover his father and their eroded love can be restored; Gil accepts without knowing she is dying.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a premise that sounds like Hallmark pablum—dying wife, last month together, reconciliation arc—and yet Romero somehow resists every manipulative turn it could take, which is either brave restraint or just boring depending on your mood.
The formal restraint here is exquisite: a film about unsaid things that knows better than to say them, structured around absence and the spaces between what a family wants to believe and what it actually is—this is the kind of controlled emotional architecture that lingers.
There's a single choice, probably in sound design or the rhythm of the edit around the moment Gil realizes the truth, that shifts the entire film from sentimental to genuinely devastating—Romero trusts the audience to feel it without being told.