Ребенок (El niño)
2022 · 4m · España
Directed by Alex Rey
Tones: contemplative, tense
The director of School 193 in Saint Petersburg phones the parents of little Vladimir. Something strange is going on with this boy, and a solution must urgently be found.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Four minutes of a phone call about a 'strange boy' sounds like the setup every suburban drama fest would greenlight — except Rey treats the unknown as genuinely unknowable, refusing to resolve or even fully name what's 'going on,' which is either the most boring or most defiant move imaginable, and I'm still not sure which.
The formal restraint here — dialogue as the entire architecture, no visual revelation, just the texture of institutional anxiety crackling through a receiver — places Rey in conversation with Bresson's radical minimalism and the Eastern European school of withholding, a deliberate negation of cinematic spectacle that demands close attention.
The entire film pivots on the phone call itself as a compositional choice: we're locked in with the director's voice, never seeing Vladimir, never seeing the school, just the grammatical weight of what isn't said — and that single decision to withhold the visual almost entirely is what makes four minutes feel like an interrogation rather than a sketch.