El hambre
2013 · 13m · España
Directed by Pau Durá
Genres: dark comedy, drama, war
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tense
Postwar. A family arrives at a farmhouse looking for lodging and food, and the owner lets them stay temporarily. One morning, one of the owner's rabbits dies infected and he orders the father to bury it; the family, dying of hunger, hesitates over whether to eat the rabbit or bury it, just as the son has an idea.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A postwar famine film that could've been earnest misery porn instead pivots into dark comedy the moment the son's idea arrives—it refuses the expected beat and trusts the audience to sit in that moral vertigo without resolving it.
Durá's compositional restraint and the way he holds the farmhouse as a closed moral system situate this within a rigorous European tradition of postwar allegory; the editing rhythm around that buried/eaten rabbit functions as the film's central formal argument.
The entire film hinges on the son's wordless moment of recognition—that single beat of a child's face when the solution arrives—and Durá trusts it completely, letting performance do what a cheaper film would telegraph with dialogue.