La Casa de Arriba
2013 · 15m · España
Directed by Marta Parreño
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, horror
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Four girls playing at being grown-ups in the abandoned flat of a neighbour who died hold a séance, and afterwards their games begin to change.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a séance-in-an-empty-flat that *doesn't* go full supernatural melodrama—instead it just lets childhood games curdle into something unsettling without explaining why, which is either brilliant refusal or pretentious hedge, and honestly I'm not sure which yet.
Parreño situates this firmly in the Spanish tradition of supernatural coming-of-age cinema (think del Toro's lineage) while maintaining rigorous formal control—the séance functions as both literal plot point and structural hinge, dividing innocence from something darker with the precision of someone who understands how cinema has always used ritual to mark transformation.
The film's real move is how it lets the camera stay almost anthropologically still during the girls' games, then subtly shifts its spatial relationship to them after the séance—a decision so quiet you almost miss it, but suddenly you're watching them differently, and that's everything.