Garabatos
2016 · 10m · España
Directed by Pedro Pacheco Arlandi
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark
Ana, a woman who loves her family, decides to put an end to the fateful situation they live in. Although the means she uses are not the most suitable, she believes she has done the right thing and tries to convince her son that everything is fine.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be provocative—a mother's mercy killing framed as maternal love—but the execution plays it too straight, too earnest; it's the kind of dark comedy that forgets to actually *commit* to either the dark or the funny, leaving you in safe middleground instead of genuinely unsettled.
Arlandi's restraint is formal and deliberate, positioning the film within a lineage of Spanish cinema's reckoning with complicity and family mythology; the tonal management between domestic intimacy and moral horror shows real curatorial control.
The film's entire weight rests on that single moment where Ana tries to convince her son everything is fine—the performance choice there, that particular calibration between delusion and desperation, is what transforms a simple dark premise into something psychologically devastating on a shoestring.