El señor del abrigo interminable
2014 · 8m · España
Directed by Victoria Sahores Ripoll
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, melancholic
It is the story of a man with a coat that does not stop growing; the man, isolated from society by this great weight and seeing it impossible to get rid of it, decides to undertake a trip towards some place where he can live quietly.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A man drowning in his own coat sounds like a cautionary tale about conformity, but Ripoll refuses to make it obvious—the absurdism stays committed, never winking, which is exactly when magical realism stops being whimsy and becomes genuinely unsettling.
The coat-as-burden is a deliberate, almost Kafkaesque formal constraint that shapes every frame; Ripoll's control over the visual metaphor and the film's measured pacing situate it squarely in the lineage of European surrealist cinema where form and symbol are inseparable.
The decision to show the coat's growth through negative space and accumulated fabric weight—never cutting away, letting it pile up in the frame—transforms a high-concept premise into something tactile and devastating on a minimal budget.