La palabra
2013 · 6m · España
Directed by Álvaro Ramos
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
With ironic touches, a drama about human incommunication shows how the spoken word, once a prized gift of the soul, has been destroyed by new technologies.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise feels like every think-piece about phones destroying souls, and the irony tag doesn't quite rescue it from being exactly what you'd expect a 2013 Spanish short about technology to be—it needed to *flip* the argument, not just wink at it.
Ramos situates this firmly in a lineage of humanist drama skeptical of modernity, but executes it with enough formal restraint and tonal control that the satire lands as genuine critique rather than polemic—this is the kind of work that justifies the form.
The particular strength here is the editing rhythm that lets silence do more work than dialogue, creating a space where the absence of real communication becomes palpable rather than stated, which is the exact constraint-into-clarity move that makes modest budgets sing.