Capgras
2020 · 19m · España
Directed by Cristian Martínez Lozano
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Alberto takes psychiatric sessions to help his wife Noelia with her pathology, Capgras syndrome, through which she suffers a delusion that her daughter Carla has been replaced by an identical impostor. Unable to open his wife's eyes, Alberto immerses himself in unconventional therapies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Capgras does the expected thing—psychological descent, unreliable reality—but then doesn't actually commit to subverting it, just stews in melancholy without the teeth to make the premise *sing*. It's competent chamber drama about a delusion, not a film that weaponizes the concept.
Lozano's restraint and formal control here—the way he photographs domestic space as psychiatric territory, the measured pacing that lets Capgras syndrome's epistemological dread accumulate—situates this within a lineage of European psychological realism that prizes craft over spectacle. This is a film for careful viewers.
The singular choice is casting Alberto in the sessions meant for his wife: that inversion, where the husband becomes the surrogate patient, reframes the whole dynamic and costs nothing but script precision—it's the kind of smart economy that transforms a modest family drama into something conceptually alive.