Era el año 2014
2016 · 27m · España
Directed by Jorge G. Satí
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, thriller
Tones: melancholic, tender, tense
In 1984, a nine-year-old goes to school sad and happy each day: happy to be near Susana, sad because Ernesto will do everything possible to stop him. On his tenth birthday Ernesto waits for him outside school with a deadly gift, but at the last moment he receives unexpected help.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a knife-fight climax here—kid versus bully, good versus evil—but Satí pulls the rug and gives us *help*, which sounds safe until you realize he's built the entire film around the fragility of that salvation, making the conventional beat feel genuinely subversive.
The film sits comfortably in the lineage of Spanish coming-of-age cinema, with a particular debt to the moral clarity of '80s childhood revisionism, though the tonal shift from tender to thriller in the final act risks undoing the formal restraint that precedes it.
That 'unexpected help' isn't dialogue or a plot device—it's the sound design and editing in the final thirty seconds that transforms what could've been melodrama into something that lands in your chest, a single structural choice that redefines everything you just watched.