En tu cabeza. Parte IV: Tú y dos veces yo
2016 · 16m · España
Directed by Daniel Sánchez Arévalo
Genres: comedy, romance, sci-fi
In 2052, Andrea works as a Resident for the Department of Energy, traveling into people's minds in the past to promote energy efficiency. Forbidden from using the trips personally, she enters the mind of Mateo, her boyfriend in 2016, to try to change her own past.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A time-travel rom-com that uses sci-fi bureaucracy as a Trojan horse for genuine heartbreak—nobody else would dare frame romance as a regulatory violation, and Sánchez Arévalo makes you buy it completely. The absurdist premise doesn't undercut the emotional stakes; it amplifies them, which is the opposite of what consensus filmmaking would do.
Sánchez Arévalo's structural control here is exemplary: the nested-timeline architecture (past-within-future-within-present) recalls the postmodern playfulness of early Kaufman, but the film earns its formal complexity through restraint rather than flourish. The whimsy never overwhelms the compositional rigor that holds these temporal layers in tension.
The revelation that Andrea is trying to change her own past—not to fix her relationship with Mateo, but to prevent herself from becoming a version of herself she can't live with—is a single character insight that reorients the entire film from wish-fulfillment fantasy into something like existential terror, and the modesty of the 16-minute runtime means that choice has to do all the heavy lifting.