La piscina vacía
2024 · 12m · España
Directed by Pablo Conde
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tense
Alba goes to her parents' for lunch; they have just built a swimming pool in their courtyard. She needs money for the down payment on a flat and has to ask her father for it, but they do not get along very well — Alba is a 'leftist' and her father a 'fascist'. Her mother and her boyfriend try to mediate, but lunch gets complicated.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's making 'family dinner goes wrong' films now, but at least Conde has the guts to let ideology actually matter instead of dissolving it into quirky awkwardness—the empty pool is almost too on-the-nose, except it isn't, because he refuses to wink at the audience about it.
Conde demonstrates considerable formal control in the way he uses the pool—absent, visible, metaphorically insistent—as both architectural and thematic anchor, and the editing rhythm of conversation-to-silence-to-eruption recalls the deliberate pacing of Haneke without the callousness; this is cinema aware of its own European lineage.
The film lives in the micro-decision to keep the camera mostly still during the lunch itself, letting the actors' physical discomfort do the work instead of cutting away—it's a choice that costs nothing and makes the whole thing feel lived-in rather than performed.