Eclipse
2016 · 10m · España
Directed by Santi Planet
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A little girl is about to witness, together with her grandmother, the event of the century: a total solar eclipse. She must face her fear of the dark to enjoy the moment day turns to night, and both will understand that the mind, too, can be eclipsed — a metaphor for the first symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The Alzheimer's metaphor lands a little too neatly—eclipse as memory loss is the kind of poetic shorthand that feels more like a greeting card than a genuine subversion, which means I'm less interested in what *Eclipse* is trying to say than in what it's afraid to actually show.
Planet demonstrates real compositional control here, building the grandmother-granddaughter relationship with the kind of emotional restraint and visual specificity that echoes the best of contemporary European family cinema—the eclipse becomes a formal conceit that mirrors both psychological states without ever winking at the audience.
The entire film hinges on a single sound design choice: the moment when the ambient world goes quiet during totality, which is when we understand the grandmother's internal silence, and that decision to trust absence over explanation is what transforms a tender premise into something genuinely felt.