Entre la vida y la culpa
2022 · 9m · España
Directed by Juanda Arboleda
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Teresa is a married and Catholic woman; unexpectedly, she becomes pregnant by another man who is not her husband, Jose, who mistreats her physically and mentally; the idea of having the child or aborting will cause Teresa to seek the advice of a friend and of the Church.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be transgressive—infidelity, abuse, abortion, faith in crisis—but it plays it completely straight, reverential even to the moral weight of it all; a genuinely subversive film would've found the crack in that earnestness, the dark comedy or contradiction hiding in Teresa's impossible position.
Arboleda orchestrates a classical moral dilemma with real precision, letting the Catholic guilt and domestic violence sit in conversation without collapsing into sermon; the formal restraint—the way the film trusts silence and proximity to do the work—positions this squarely in the lineage of intimate European social drama.
The film lives or dies on how Arboleda frames Teresa's face during the moments of decision, and that choice—whether to hold on her or cut away—becomes the entire argument about her agency; it's a small film that understands one compositional commitment can rewrite the entire moral texture.