Jupiter Rain
2021 · 18m · España
Directed by Imanol Ruiz de Lara
Genres: drama, mystery, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Ío, adrift after losing her job in a world where every reference point seems to dissolve, searches under the rain for something she cannot name, crossing paths with a cat, an enigmatic girl and a yellow umbrella.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a gentle, poetic drift through loss—which is exactly why it's boring them. Ruiz de Lara's playing it too safe in the surrealism lane, letting the yellow umbrella and mysterious girl do the heavy lifting instead of actually disturbing the premise.
A measured descent into formlessness that recalls the European art-cinema tradition of Tarkovsky and Haneke—the rain as both metaphor and formal constraint, each encounter precisely calibrated to avoid resolution. The craft is there, but it settles into what we already know.
That single choice to have Ío search for something she *cannot name*—it reframes the entire 18 minutes from passive melancholy into active philosophical vertigo, and the film's tiny budget becomes an asset because every frame has to earn that unnamed wanting. The yellow umbrella works because the camera trusts the rain to do the rest.