El ciclo
2018 · 13m · Chile
Directed by Danilo Camus
Genres: drama, mystery, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A man wakes disconcerted, feeling strange, with no knowledge of place or purpose. Acting almost as an automaton, the man moves forward on a journey that leads back to truth.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The amnesiac-automaton premise is so well-trodden that Camus needs to bend it harder to justify 13 minutes—the surrealism feels more decorative than subversive, trading genuine weirdness for mood.
A rigorously composed meditation on memory and return, where the formal restraint—minimal dialogue, careful framing, the cyclical structure itself—recalls the European art-cinema tradition of Tarkovsky and Haneke without imitating their excess.
The choice to shoot the protagonist's movement as mechanical repetition with nearly imperceptible variations is what makes the amnesia premise land; that small modulation in gait between loops is where the whole film's meaning lives.