Hidrólisis
2012 · 9m · España
Directed by Sergi Miralles
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Fran and Laura, who believe they are the perfect couple, play a game from their balcony guessing what people below are saying, and the innocent game exposes the shortcomings of their own relationship.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is deceptively simple—couple plays guess-the-stranger, relationship implodes—but Miralles resists the easy emotional payoff; instead he lets the comedy and dread coexist in a way that feels genuinely unsettling rather than cleverly subversive.
A formally precise chamber piece that recalls the European relationship-dissection tradition while maintaining its own tonal discipline; the balcony framing and the game-within-frame structure show deliberate compositional control.
The genius here is the sound design—how the indistinct murmur of the street below gradually becomes the subtext of Fran and Laura's own dialogue, collapsing the distance between observer and observed without a single expository beat.