La terapia
2023 · 26m · España
Directed by Francisco Javier Offerrall
Tones: contemplative, tense
At a psychiatric centre, Dr. Ramos runs a group therapy session where Julio, a patient who does not know why he is there, must open up before four strangers to find answers.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The therapy-session-as-mystery setup *looks* conventional until you realize the film is actively resisting revelation—Julio's silence becomes the point, not the problem. Subversive in its refusal to satisfy the audience's demand for catharsis, which means it'll either infuriate people or make them think differently about what confession actually does.
Offerrall positions this firmly in the psychodrama lineage (Bresson's *Au Hasard Balthazar*, Haneke's early work) while the formal constraint—a single therapy session, one actor's opacity—generates real compositional rigor; the editing and framing do the heavy lifting of character revelation that dialogue refuses to provide.
The decision to keep Julio's motivation genuinely opaque, even to him, hinges entirely on one performance choice—the specific *texture* of confusion and resistance in the lead actor—and when that lands, the entire 26 minutes crystallizes into something that feels inevitable rather than gimmicky.