Hamelin
2018 · 10m · España
Directed by Silvia Conesa
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
In the near future, affluent couple Juan and Clara hire YouCare, a service that raises their child for them inside their own home.
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A premise that should be repulsive—outsourcing parenthood to an algorithm—somehow becomes a mirror held up to contemporary anxiety rather than a sermon, which is exactly the kind of subversive restraint that makes people uncomfortable in the right way.
Conesa understands the lineage of speculative domestic drama; there's DNA here from both Haneke's clinical unease and the European sci-fi tradition of using intimate spaces to interrogate social systems, all executed with formal precision that resists easy moralizing.
The film's nerve ending is its camera work—the decision to keep YouCare mostly off-frame, letting absence do the psychological work rather than showing us the technology, transforms what could've been a gadget-focused gimmick into something genuinely unsettling.