Androides
2009 · 16m · España
Directed by María Pérez
Genres: coming-of-age, romance, sci-fi
Tones: melancholic, tender, whimsical
Simón, an androgynous, lonely teenager spending a boring summer with his family, tries in his spare time to contact extraterrestrials — until a mysterious new neighbour steals his heart.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup screams YA wish-fulfillment—lonely kid, mysterious crush, aliens as metaphor—but Pérez refuses the payoff; instead she lets melancholy win, and the film becomes genuinely strange because of what it *doesn't* resolve. It's a subversion that earns itself.
Pérez situates this in a lineage of European coming-of-age cinema (Vigo, early Haneke) where summer ennui becomes a formal study in isolation; the restraint in not romanticizing either the teenager's longing or the neighbour's intrusion shows real curatorial maturity.
The decision to keep the neighbour's motivations opaque—to never confirm or deny reciprocal interest—transforms what could've been a conventional queer awakening into something unsettling and true; that ambiguity, sustained across 16 minutes on a modest budget, is everything.