Inquilinos
2024 · 3m · España
Directed by Miguel Álvarez
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Three friends celebrate signing a rental lease they can finally call home, but a year later harsh reality sends them back to square one, reflecting on how quickly their time there slipped away.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent melancholy-about-housing story that hits expected beats—friends, lease, eviction, reflection—and while the economy of three minutes is tight, there's nothing here that surprises or subverts the coming-of-age rental-precarity narrative we've already seen a dozen times over.
Álvarez constructs a formally elegant temporal collapse, using the lease signing and its year-later echo as bookends to interrogate impermanence in a way that gestures toward a lineage of observational cinema about aspiration and loss, though the execution remains earnest rather than formally adventurous.
The film hinges on a single formal choice—the elision of that year, collapsing celebration into eviction with minimal transition—and it's that structural compression that transforms what could've been a generic precarity piece into something genuinely felt and economical.