Golondrina
2021 · 11m · España
Directed by María Ortega
Genres: drama, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
After swallowing a large quantity of pills over a problem she dares not reveal, Enara falls into a coma where she meets her inner child, who helps her face what brought her there and find a way back to tell her truth.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The suicide-attempt-meets-inner-child setup is exactly the kind of Hallmark-adjacent premise that makes me want to run, but Ortega's refusal to explain the 'problem she dares not reveal' is genuinely subversive—she trusts the surrealism to do the unspeakable work instead of confession.
There's a lineage here—the dream-logic conversations with the child-self recall everything from Cocteau to contemporary magical realism—but what keeps it from feeling derivative is Ortega's formal restraint, letting the surreal imagery breathe without overselling the metaphor.
The choice to withhold the reason for Enara's overdose creates an absence that pulls the entire film toward abstraction, and that single structural decision transforms what could've been therapeutic drama into something genuinely unmoored and strange.