El soñador
2004 · 14m · España
Directed by Oskar Santos
Genres: drama, historical, mystery
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In the late 19th century, reputed alienist Guillermo Rivas accepts a strange medical case: Don Diego de Robledo, a young nobleman who, for unknown causes, can sleep up to three days in a row, an excess of sleep that is causing him grave mental disorders.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 19th-century medical mystery about pathological sleep should feel absurd, but Santos plays it straight—which is either cowardly restraint or the only honest move, and I'm genuinely unsure which bothers me more.
The film positions itself in a lineage of literary adaptation and period psychological study, using the formal apparatus of the alienist's gaze to create something deeply composed and architecturally sound—this is cinema aware of its own historical weight.
The entire film hinges on Santos's choice to keep the camera still during the nobleman's sleeping sequences, letting time accumulate visually rather than cutting away—that single formal restraint is what transforms medical curiosity into something genuinely uncanny.