Como yo te amo
2016 · 23m · España
Directed by Fernando García-Ruiz
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Dani is a small-time delinquent who falls in love with the policewoman who arrests him after robbing a shop. It is love at first sight, an unexpected flash; above all it is a novelty, because Dani had never fallen in love. From that moment on, only the hope of seeing Patricia again keeps him alive.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A cop-and-criminal romance sounds like Hallmark-channel pablum, but García-Ruiz commits so completely to the absurdity of Dani's one-sided devotion that it almost becomes a perverse love letter to delusion itself — not quite subversive enough to fully work, but weird enough that I didn't hate it.
The film positions itself thoughtfully within a lineage of Spanish neorealism and romantic melodrama, using restraint and the studied distance of the police procedural to frame an intimate emotional crisis with formal precision.
What lifts this is the decision to let Dani's hope live almost entirely in negative space — the film barely shows us Patricia, and instead builds the entire emotional weight on a small-time actor's face waiting for someone who will never come back, which is a brutal and economical choice.