La Puerta
2017 · 11m · España
Directed by Adrià Guxens
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, whimsical
After his father's death, Lucas, a nine-year-old boy with an overflowing imagination, moves with his mother to his grandparents' house. There he finds an old locked door that leads him to wonder what may be on the other side, in a story that explores grief from a child's perspective.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Grief-through-a-locked-door is exactly the kind of safe metaphor that makes me want to scream, but Guxens commits to it so fully—treating the door like a real psychological knot rather than a symbol to be solved—that it somehow escapes its own cliché.
A formally precise meditation on absence that sits comfortably in the European art-cinema tradition of magical realism as emotional apparatus; the restraint in not revealing what's behind the door is the craft decision that elevates it beyond children's fable into something more architecturally sound.
The entire film hinges on a single choice—shooting the boy's face in profile as he listens at the door, refusing close-ups that would telegraph emotion—and that refusal to manipulate transforms a familiar setup into something genuinely unsettling about how children process loss.