Como niños chicos
2017 · 39m · España
Directed by María del Pino
Isabel, a successful psychiatrist, faces a new challenge: a mental illness that is becoming fashionable, in which adults become like small children because of stress, love problems and the like. She is doing well curing them at her centre until Luis, the mayor of her town, appears.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise so genuinely unhinged—adults regressing into literal children as a stress-induced epidemic—that it shouldn't work, and yet del Pino commits to it with the kind of deadpan sincerity that makes the absurdity sing. The moment the mayor shows up is where consensus taste gets nervous, which is exactly when this film becomes essential.
Del Pino positions this squarely in a lineage of magical realist social comedy, though the execution relies on tonal discipline that the 39-minute runtime strains to maintain; the interplay between clinical psychiatric framing and whimsical premise gestures at something formally interesting without quite achieving the considered restraint that would elevate it to the level of its influences.
The real work here is the casting and performance choice—watching Isabel navigate a patient who's *literally* become a child forces an actor to find the specific muscle between professional distance and bewilderment, and that micro-adjustment in how she holds her composure becomes the film's entire emotional spine.