La Fièvre
2019 · 20m · España
Directed by José María Flores
Genres: comedy, fantasy, romance
Tones: surreal, tender, whimsical
In the doctor's waiting room, all patients are quietly keeping their secrets; there, surrounded by whispers, a magical love story is born between a patient tired of being quiet and the nurse on the sign reminding: 'Quiet please'.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise is audacious enough—romance with a *sign*—but the film doesn't seem to want to earn the weirdness; it settles into whimsy instead of pushing into the genuinely unsettling territory that setup demands.
Flores locates himself in a lineage of magical realism and European romantic comedy, executing the conceit with formal restraint; the waiting room becomes a liminal space where emotional vulnerability and surreal tenderness coexist with real craft discipline.
The decision to animate or personify the sign itself—to treat it not as metaphor but as actual presence—is what sells this; that one commitment to literalizing the fantastical turns a cute idea into something that genuinely lands.