Bookworm
2023 · 13m · Spain
Directed by Javier Yañez
Genres: fantasy, historical, horror
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In 1979 Spain, a budding writer becomes obsessed with the ethereal ghost haunting the library where she works.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A ghost-in-the-library romance in 1979 Spain sounds like the exact kind of precious literary fantasy everyone else would greenlight—except Yañez actually resists the sentimentality and lets the obsession curdle into something genuinely unsettling, which is the only reason it works.
Yañez positions this squarely in the lineage of European supernatural literary cinema—there's Cocteau's touch, a hint of Arguello's melancholia—and the formal restraint (the editing, the way he holds shots of empty shelves) proves he understands that tradition deeply enough to honor it without genuflecting.
The decision to shoot the ghost as consistently present rather than spectral—just slightly out of focus, just slightly wrong in the frame—transforms what could've been a cliché into something that lives in the space between reality and yearning, and it's achieved on what clearly wasn't a substantial budget.