Así Nos Vamos
2007 · 5m · Chile
Directed by Magdalena Gissi Barbieri
Genres: drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tense
Benito and Martita, an elderly Buenos Aires couple, are driving in their car when they get lost among the hills of Valparaíso. As time passes and the streets keep repeating, both grow tense and end up in an argument that leads them to a strange ending.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A couple stuck in a geometric loop of Buenos Aires streets that curdles from mundane frustration into something genuinely unsettling—it's got the deadpan nightmare logic everyone sleeps on, but the execution feels too tidy, too aware of its own metaphor to really *disturb* me.
Barbieri's command of spatial repetition and tonal escalation situates this firmly in the lineage of Buñuel and the Argentine experimental cinema of the early aughts; the restraint in how she lets dread accumulate through framing and performance choices marks this as genuinely considered craft.
That moment when the argument pivots from petty marital tension into something genuinely otherworldly hangs entirely on how little the camera moves—Barbieri refuses the expected close-ups, keeps them both in frame and trapped, and it's that single refusal of emotional punctuation that makes the strangeness *land*.