Decorado
2016 · 11m · España
Directed by Alberto Vázquez
Genres: drama, experimental, satire
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
Through a fragmented, polyhedral narration assembled like a puzzle, this satirical existential fable follows the deterioration of a relationship and how it affects the world around the couple.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Vázquez builds a satire out of pure formal constraint—polyhedral narration, fragmented voices, a relationship crumbling through structural abstraction rather than melodrama—which should be insufferably precious but somehow isn't, because he never winks at you.
The puzzle-box construction recalls Roeg and early Haneke, but Decorado stakes its own claim through meticulous editing that transforms domestic deterioration into something genuinely philosophical; this is the kind of formally rigorous miniature that justifies the experimental tag.
The genius move is burying the emotional core beneath all that fragmentation—you feel the relationship dying not through scenes but through the *way* the narration itself begins to contradict and misalign, a single structural decision that does all the heavy lifting.