Animal
2019 · 20m · España
Directed by Dani Zarandieta
Genres: drama
Tones: melancholic, tender
Alba, a homeless addict and prostitute, is offered a roof, a shower, and food by Ruth for one night, on the sole condition that she help fulfil the last wish of Ruth's little sister Eva.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup looks like trauma-porn scaffolding—vulnerable woman, charity, a dying child's wish—but Zarandieta refuses the sentimental payoff, instead letting the awkwardness and small refusals live in the frame, which is exactly the kind of subversion that works because it earns it.
There's a deliberate restraint here, a lineage traceable to kitchen-sink realism and the European social drama, where the formal choice to stay close and unhurried becomes the argument itself—less about what happens than how these two women negotiate intimacy and obligation in a single night.
The film pivots entirely on casting Alba and Ruth as near-strangers who cannot quite synchronize their rhythms, and that persistent tonal friction—the way neither performance reaches for connection—is what transforms a one-night-shelter premise into something that actually unsettles you.