ANHEDONIA
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Marcos Martínez, Mar Blanes
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Fran lives on pause inside a gray routine until he begins online therapy with Marta, a psychologist who tries to break down the wall separating him from the world; what starts as an awkward silence before a screen slowly becomes a journey inward, where company and words begin to heal.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Online therapy as emotional salvation feels like the safest possible premise for a short film about disconnection—exactly the kind of consensus-approved epiphany that makes me wonder what Martínez and Blanes are actually saying beneath the surface, or if they're just being sincere.
The formal restraint of conducting intimacy through a screen, with silence doing the compositional work that dialogue won't, places this in a deliberate lineage of Koreeda-adjacent restraint and Haneke's fascination with mediation; the two-shot framing becomes the film's central argument about presence.
The decision to let the pauses—the actual silence between Fran and Marta—carry the emotional weight rather than rush to resolution is what makes three minutes feel like a held breath; it's a film that trusts awkwardness as the texture that heals.