Infarto con rotura de corazón
2011 · 41m · España
Directed by Miguel Ángel Barroso
Tones: dark, melancholic, theatrical
Flatmates Amparo, involved with a married older man, and actress Marisa, who begins a dangerous relationship with depressed theatre director Adolfo after his daughter's death, face days that will turn tragic.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 41-minute Spanish melodrama about infidelity and grief sounds like exactly the kind of emotional luggage everyone else fawns over — and yet Barroso somehow makes the predictable interpersonal wreckage feel genuinely claustrophobic, almost like watching two people slowly asphyxiate in a room that keeps getting smaller.
There's a formal rigor to how Barroso orchestrates parallel devastations—the affair consuming Amparo, the grief-spiral destroying Adolfo—that recalls the Spanish theatrical tradition of moral entanglement; the film's length and refusal to cut away from uncomfortable silences marks it as work that understands its own lineage.
The restraint in the editing—those held frames on Marisa's face as she realizes what she's gotten into with Adolfo—does more narrative work than any exposition dump could; that single choice of letting the actor's recognition breathe is what transforms this from familiar romantic tragedy into something genuinely unsettling.