Durandal
2013 · 14m · España
Directed by Juanma Romero Gárriz
Tones: contemplative, tender
A young couple meets a mysterious man in a park who claims to be an expert falconer; the encounter becomes a test for them as they share the hope that the peregrine falcon Durandal will return to its master's fist.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A falcon-whisperer stranger testing a couple's faith in nature's return—it's sentimental on paper, but Romero Gárriz refuses to sentimentalize it, which is the only move that makes it work at all.
The film locates itself in a deliberate lineage of European mystery cinema, where patience and formal restraint become the architecture of meaning; the waiting for Durandal's return mirrors the viewer's own surrender to the film's unhurried rhythm.
What lifts this above premise-as-parable is the decision to keep the mysterious man's interiority completely sealed—we read him only through the couple's shifting trust, and that withholding transforms a 14-minute sketch into something genuinely unsettling.