El círculo (The circle)
2011 · 19m · España
Directed by Alfonso San Eugenio
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
What begins as a diet and exercise to lose weight becomes a battle between the obsession with slimming and the need to eat. Lucía withdraws ever further into herself, in a prison shaped like a circle.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A visual metaphor so literal it circles back on itself—the premise is the form, which would be unbearable if it weren't so genuinely weird; San Eugenio commits to the bit hard enough that the surrealism actually earns its melancholy instead of just gesturing at it.
The circle as both narrative container and formal obsession places this in dialogue with structural cinema while remaining emotionally legible; a formally rigorous examination of bodily obsession that situates itself precisely between essay and portrait.
The decision to make the frame itself circular, to trap the viewer in the same looping geometry as Lucía's disorder, is the kind of structural choice that transforms a recognizable eating-disorder narrative into something you actually feel the shape of.