Impulsos
2019 · 5m · España
Directed by Zoa Peña, Mario del Barrio
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
A young soldier and an enthusiastic tourist seek shelter far from the war while the Blue Shadow virus — with its dizziness, vomiting and hemorrhages — keeps spreading around them.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's war-meets-plague meets romance, which should be a mess, but Peña and del Barrio refuse to pick a lane—and that refusal is exactly what keeps it from being another competent genre exercise.
The formal restraint here echoes a lineage of European minimalist cinema, where the intimacy between two strangers becomes the emotional architecture that the pandemic merely frames—a deliberate formal choice that elevates the material.
The decision to shoot most of this in static, observational takes while the virus spreads invisibly around them means every micro-performance, every held glance, carries the weight of existential threat—that economy of gesture is what makes five minutes feel inevitable.