Dales lo que quieren
2016 · 16m · España
Directed by Edu Esteban
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Condemned to death for the murder of her children, a woman invites the woman who will execute her to dinner as her last wish, to tell her version of events for the first time. In the cold interrogation room of death row, the two women discover that their lives are not so different.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise promises transgression — a condemned woman rewriting her own narrative — but it folds into something too tidy, too reconciliatory; the film wants us to see both sides instead of sitting in the actual horror of the accusation, which is where the real subversion would live.
Esteban orchestrates a masterclass in spatial and temporal compression: two figures, one room, dialogue as excavation—it recalls the rigorous chamber drama tradition (Bergman, Mamet) while earning its own formal discipline through the deliberate withholding of whether we ever truly know which woman's version is real.
The entire film hinges on a single directorial choice—keeping the camera locked on the executioner's face during the confession, refusing to cut to reaction shots—which transforms what could be melodrama into something genuinely destabilizing about who we're asked to believe.