El jardín de Vero
2018 · 18m · España
Directed by Miguel Parra
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, theatrical
For Vero, only the future matters, and she is organizing a grand party for Chinese businessmen who can help her overcome her bad luck — but her past keeps striking back, threatening to confiscate her party, her garden and her husband Pedro.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A woman throwing a party to seduce her future while her past literally shows up to wreck it—that's the kind of absurdist collision most festivals would sand down into something safer, but Parra leans into the theatrical fever dream and lets it get messy. Dark comedy that actually has teeth and doesn't apologize for its own weirdness.
The tonal register here—balancing domestic melodrama with baroque theatricality—shows a filmmaker aware of how to modulate between intimacy and spectacle, even in 18 minutes; there's a lineage of Latin American cinema playing with magical realism's emotional undertow in this.
The decision to treat Vero's superstition and her business ambition not as separate character traits but as the same desperate gesture gives the whole film its spine—everything else (the garden, Pedro, the party) becomes a mirror for that single driving delusion.