Encuentro con mi madre muerta
2015 · 8m · España
Directed by Frédéric Becquelin-Miler, Nacho Recio
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
On a windy night, a son dreams of his mother, who died years earlier; she sees him, speaks to him, and then vanishes again, leaving the question of whether it was a message from beyond.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The dream-logic premise is solid, but it plays it straight—grief-as-visitation is the oldest ghost story in the book, and Becquelin-Miler and Recio don't seem interested in sabotaging or complicating that tired archetype, which feels like a missed opportunity.
A formally controlled meditation on loss and the liminal space between mourning and acceptance, where the restraint of the direction and the compositional care of each frame situate it firmly within the lineage of European poetic cinema—Tarkovsky's shadow is felt, and earned.
The decision to keep the mother's presence ambiguous through sound design rather than visual confirmation—her voice arriving before we see her, lingering after she's gone—is what transforms what could be mawkish into something genuinely unsettling and alive.