La Ropavejera
2014 · 29m · España
Directed by Nacho Ruipérez
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Locked in a portentous nineteenth-century mansion, 9 children live together receiving the orders and abuses of a woman who likes the little ones to refer to her as 'mother'; her right hand is another girl, Angelita, who punishes her equals in order to maintain order and obedience in the house, and everything is complicated with the arrival of a new victim, Teresita, whose obstinacy could be the broken link that definitively stops the chain of abuses and mistreatment.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the new girl to be the savior; Ruipérez refuses that fantasy and instead watches how systems of abuse calcify even in the young, which is genuinely unsettling in a way most 'dark' films aren't brave enough to sit with.
The film's formal restraint—its refusal to sensationalize the institutional horror, its deliberate pacing through quotidian cruelty—positions it squarely in a lineage of European art cinema concerned with power structures and moral complicity, executed with exact compositional control.
The decision to make Angelita not a villain but a trapped intermediary, forced to administer the system rather than escape it, is the hinge that transforms what could be exploitation into something far more devastating about how abuse reproduces itself.