La estampa
2015 · 14m · España
Directed by Paloma García
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
About to start a new life with her boyfriend Tomás, Ada is shaken by an unexpected event that forces her to rethink her childhood, her faith, and the holy card she has kept since childhood — a talisman that now feels like her greatest threat.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A holy card as threat instead of comfort—that's a genuinely unsettling inversion—but García plays it too straight, letting the symbolism do the heavy lifting instead of twisting the knife deeper into the coming-of-age formula.
García's formal restraint elevates what could be a simple faith-crisis narrative into something with real compositional weight; the way she frames Ada's reckoning with childhood talismans recalls a lineage of European introspection cinema, all measured cuts and earned melancholy.
The decision to make the holy card itself the antagonist—to let a static, inanimate object carry the full psychological burden of Ada's rupture—is the kind of economical storytelling choice that transforms a modest runtime into something genuinely haunting.