Feliz aniversario.
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Ana Ramire
Genres: dark comedy, horror, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, provocative
On a lonely beach at dusk, Bruno sits at a table set for a romantic dinner, guided by a letter from his girlfriend through an intimate, sarcastic, and unsettling narration of a life marked by family abuse, infidelities, and emotional wounds.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A romantic dinner setup that pivots into psychological carnage via voiceover—the setup screams greeting-card sentimentality until the letter itself becomes a weapon, which is exactly the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable enough to actually *feel* something. Ramire's willingness to make the intimate grotesque is the move that separates this from festival-circuit trauma porn.
The formal restraint here is what lands: a static mise-en-scène anchored by table geometry and dusk light, allowing the voiceover to do the tonal heavy lifting without cinematic flourish, a restraint that situates the work within a lineage of intimate horror that values psychological precision over spectacle.
The decision to let the girlfriend's voice—sarcastic, unsparing, narrating her own damage while setting a trap—remain the sole active element while Bruno listens at the table is the singular choice that transforms what could've been melodrama into something genuinely unsettling, and Ramire trusts that restraint completely.