Dientes
2018 · 11m · España
Directed by Pepe Luis Pareja
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Trini, a single mother trying to raise her son, suffers a periodontal disease that makes her lose all her teeth; one day in her life is enough to see the situations she must face.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a shame Dientes plays it so straight—the premise is genuinely unsettling (teeth as metaphor for dignity, poverty, motherhood all collapsing at once), but Pareja photographs it like a social-realist PSA instead of leaning into the grotesque or absurd potential that could've made this actually risky.
Pareja positions himself squarely in the Spanish social-realist lineage, and the formal discipline is evident: the one-day structure, the measured observation of quotidian humiliation, the refusal of sentimentality—though the film never quite transcends its own constraint.
The decision to stage every interaction through Trini's mouth—closed, turned away, hand-covered—is the entire film, and it works; that single formal choice transforms what could've been maudlin into something physically and psychologically specific about how poverty performs itself.