La habitación de las estrellas
2017 · 16m · España
Directed by Ilune Díaz
Genres: drama, family, fantasy
Tones: melancholic, tender, whimsical
Elena visits a grandmother's house for the first time after years apart, and the grandmother, affected by Alzheimer's disease, asks Elena to fetch the stars hidden somewhere in the house. The visit becomes a race against time to fulfil a last wish.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A grandmother with Alzheimer's asks her granddaughter to find stars hidden in a house—it's a lovely premise, sure, but it never commits to the surreal weirdness of that central image; it plays it safe as tender family drama when it could've been genuinely unsettling.
Díaz works in a lineage of magical-realist family portraiture—there's clear kinship with del Toro's sensibility—and the film's restraint in not over-explaining the grandmother's logic shows formal discipline, even if the execution doesn't quite achieve the emotional architecture it's reaching for.
The decision to shoot the search for stars as a series of small, specific moments—a hand reaching into darkness, a child's face catching light—rather than staging grand magical reveals is what makes this work; it's all found in the spaces between, in how Díaz lets the camera linger on ordinary objects becoming extraordinary through attention alone.