Con lengua
2006 · 17m · España
Directed by Anna R. Costa
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Minutes before undergoing surgery, fourteen-year-old Julia locks herself in the operating theatre's bathroom, putting the nurse attending her in a serious bind. Through the teenager's eyes, the film explores the fear of death, deception and loneliness.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A teenager barricading herself in a pre-surgery bathroom is genuinely perverse—it flips the expected vulnerability angle and makes the nurse, not the patient, the one scrambling for control. Costa stays locked in Julia's headspace long enough that the melodrama becomes something weirder and more honest than typical coming-of-age hand-wringing.
The film's restraint in a confined space recalls the psychological pressure of Haneke's work, and the formal precision of the editing—each silence, each cut back to Julia's face—demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how duration and framing can collapse time into genuine dread.
The decision to shoot almost entirely from Julia's eye line and keep the camera static in that bathroom transforms a simple logline into something claustrophobic and intimate; that single formal choice is what makes the fear tangible instead of sentimental.