Ensoñación excesiva
2021 · 7m · España
Directed by Mariana Raymond
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A young woman living in Tokyo, devastated after her only friend betrays her with her boyfriend, escapes her suffering through dreams and meditations that feel so real she takes refuge in them.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's doing the grief-as-surrealism thing right now, and Raymond's premise doesn't fight it—so why does it work? Because she commits to the bit: the dreams aren't escape poetry, they're a genuine survival mechanism, and that moral ambiguity is what saves it from feeling like every other melancholic Tokyo fantasy.
Raymond demonstrates a precise understanding of how dream logic functions cinematically—the film sits comfortably in a lineage from Koreeda to contemporary Japanese oneiric cinema—but what elevates it is her restraint; she doesn't oversell the surrealism, letting meditative pacing and formal composition do the philosophical work.
The singular choice here is the sound design's decision to blur waking and dreaming environments rather than contrast them—by keeping the audio texture almost identical, Raymond forces you to distrust your own sense of which world matters, and on a 7-minute budget that's the whole film right there.