Algo que sólo Dios conoce
2010 · 6m · España
Directed by Bruno Herrero
Genres: experimental, historical
Tones: contemplative, surreal
In 1890, a train struggles across steep terrain carrying at least six passengers, three per compartment, exchanging quick glances and throat-clearings.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Six minutes of people not talking in a train compartment—it's the kind of nothing-happens premise that would bore most scouts to tears, which is exactly why I'm suspicious it might be doing something genuinely weird underneath; I need to see it to know if Herrero's sitting on a subversive joke about bourgeois restraint or if he's just made an experimental snooze.
Herrero builds a formal constraint—the compartment as a frame within the frame, the glances and throat-clearings as a vocabulary of unspoken class negotiation—that recalls the observational rigor of Bresson or early Kiarostami, where silence itself becomes a lineage; this is cinema that knows exactly what it descends from.
The entire film hinges on the decision to let minor gestures—a throat-clear, a glance held just long enough—carry the weight instead of dialogue or plot, and that restraint, that faith in the smallest human sounds, is what transforms six minutes on a train into something that lingers.