La chica del vestido rojo y sombrero amarillo
2019 · 13m · Chile
Directed by Álvaro Rozas Leiva
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Every night an enigmatic girl in red with a yellow hat passionately throws herself into Pablo's arms at the train station — however, he loves his wife.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A ghost-lover melodrama that *could* be twee, but Rozas resists the sentimental trap entirely—there's something genuinely unsettling about the repetition, the way desire becomes compulsion becomes haunting. It's a romance that refuses to be romantic, which is exactly the kind of subversion worth watching.
The formal restraint here is exceptional: a 13-minute loop that evokes both magical realism and the grammar of mid-century European cinema without borrowing wholesale from either. The editing sustains an almost unbearable tension between the everyday (the train station, the commute) and the uncanny, positioning this firmly in the lineage of contemplative, character-driven shorts that prize mood over plot resolution.
The single recurring gesture—that nightly throw into his arms—becomes the entire architecture of the film; it's a choice that transforms what could be conventional romance into something fractured and unknowable, and Rozas commits to it completely, letting that one moment carry all the weight of longing and impossibility.