Escarnio
2004 · 24m · España
Directed by Raúl Cerezo
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Based on Horacio Quiroga's tale of the beheaded hen, a marriage watches children contract a strange illness that parents feel unable to face. The children pass into the care of a sister and sister-in-law who also serves the house, while parents await a new birth to forget disgrace.
Picked by Margot
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Cerezo does something genuinely perverse here—adapting Quiroga's surreal naturalism into a domestic horror that refuses to explain itself, letting the 'strange illness' remain genuinely strange while the parents' denial becomes the real obscenity; it's the kind of restraint that makes consensus uncomfortable.
The film sits precisely in the lineage of Latin American literary adaptation and psychological horror, with a formal clarity in how it withholds—the composition of those children, the deliberate absence of diagnosis—that echoes both Quiroga's originary logic and the European art cinema tradition; it's a text that knows exactly what tradition it's interrogating.
The decision to keep the camera observational and almost anthropological while the family structure silently fractures is what makes this work—there's no score to tell you what to feel, no close-ups manufactured for sympathy, just the architectural coldness of rooms and the editing rhythm that lets you notice what the parents refuse to see.