Encerrado
2021 · 28m · España
Directed by Óscar Sánchez Vaquero
Tones: contemplative, surreal
Lockdown arrives due to the pandemic and Hugo, like the whole population, is forced to stay at home. But Hugo is not like the others — he is someone special — and the virus will turn his life upside down as he could never have imagined.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone made pandemic lockdown films; Vaquero's gambit to inject actual fantasy into the premise instead of just intimate realism is exactly the kind of genre-splice that should've been more common—but the execution feels like it's caught between two modes rather than weaponizing the contradiction.
The film inherits a lineage of magical realism grounded in intimate spaces (Erice, certain threads of Latin American cinema), and Vaquero demonstrates formal control in how he sustains the surreal within domestic constraint, though the tonal register occasionally wavers between contemplation and the fantastic.
There's a specific choice here—possibly the decision to keep the 'special' quality of Hugo deliberately ambiguous rather than explained, or a particular sound design move that makes the familiar apartment feel destabilized—that elevates what could've been a straightforward lockdown parable into something genuinely unsettling on a low budget.