EVA
2021 · 12m · Argentina
Directed by Gonzo Llorente
Genres: drama, surrealism, thriller
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Eva lives in isolation due to a great pandemic. After discovering that she is pregnant, she senses something bad will happen to her baby after delivery, and she sinks into despair, not knowing how to avoid this obscure destiny.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A pregnant woman afraid of destiny isn't exactly subversive—it's Greek tragedy filtered through pandemic anxiety, which feels more like following the template than breaking it. The surrealism promises weirdness but doesn't quite earn the genre-bend credentials I'm looking for.
Llorente situates Eva within a classical lineage—maternal dread, fated suffering, the body as site of mythic inevitability—and the film's formal restraint (melancholic, contemplative) suggests a director conscious of how cinema has already asked these questions. This is craft in conversation with tradition, the kind of short that justifies itself through precision rather than novelty.
The premise is heavy-handed, but there's likely one moment—a gesture, a sound design choice during the pregnancy revelation, maybe the visual language around the 'bad thing' she senses—where Llorente makes the abstract dread concrete enough to carry the whole thing on a single creative decision.