Catalizados
2016 · 8m · España
Directed by Isidro Fernández González
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
Two couples have a strange relationship: one romance is burned out by the passage of time and the other is a love story just beginning. Both relationships turn surreal when Lucas drinks a magic potion made from a genuine white wine.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A magic potion that doesn't fix anything—just warps two relationships into something unrecognizable and bleaker than before. It's a premise that refuses to let fantasy be escapist, and most scouts would've sanded down the edges; Fernández González keeps them sharp.
The surrealist register sits uneasily against the intimate scale of these two couples, and that tension—whether intentional or not—leaves the film hovering between modes rather than settling into either with the formal conviction it needs.
The choice to make the magic potion a catalyst for estrangement rather than connection is what sells this; it's a single inversion of expectation that forces the whole 8 minutes to work harder, and on a micro budget that's exactly the kind of economy that matters.