Anabel
2018 · 13m
Directed by Joaquín Pérez Ordóñez
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Martín has achieved all his teenage dreams yet lives in the past, dissatisfied; to find what broke along the way he must journey back to that idealized past and the woman he loved.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A nostalgic romance about a guy stuck in the past—exactly the kind of safe, melancholic premise that gets programmed everywhere. There's nothing here that breaks the mold or makes you squirm, just well-trodden emotional real estate.
Pérez Ordóñez constructs a formally precise meditation on the gap between memory and present selfhood, where the journey backward becomes the film's structural argument—a quiet, considered piece that earns its place in the lineage of introspective European drama.
The film lives or dies on how it handles the return to that past moment, and there's likely a single editing choice or performance beat—probably in how Martín confronts Anabel—that either locks the emotional architecture or leaves it diffuse.