Karma
2019 · 16m · España
Directed by Armando del Río
Genres: drama, fantasy, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, mythic
Clara dreams she was raped and murdered in a remote era by Daniel, the man she now lives with, and hypnotic regression therapy confirms he has been her aggressor in many past lives, with her best friend Yerai bound to the same karmic triangle.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people would've made this a straightforward trauma thriller, but del Río dares to literalize the karmic premise—treating past-life regression not as pseudoscience gimmick but as metaphysical fact—and that refusal to wink at the audience is exactly the kind of committed weirdness that separates the films worth arguing about from the ones that play it safe.
Del Río situates himself in the lineage of contemporary European psychological horror—there's echoes of Haneke's formal restraint and the mythic density of arthouse trauma cinema—and the film's rigorous commitment to the geometry of a recurring triangle across time shows real formal intelligence, even if the karmic framework occasionally strains against the psychological realism it's built on.
The entire film hinges on the specific choice to keep the regression sequences fragmented and dreamlike rather than declarative, letting the fractured editing do the psychological heavy lifting instead of exposition—it's a decision that costs nothing but precision, and it transforms what could've been a gimmick premise into something genuinely unsettling.