La Virgen Santa
2021 · 18m · España
Directed by Ana Revert
Genres: dark comedy, drama, mystery
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tense
In a claustrophobic town in deep Murcia, Lourdes, a middle-aged woman trapped with a husband who neither deserves nor respects her, hides a great secret, one that comes to light when she finds a microphone hidden inside the portable Virgin Mary sanctuary that rotates among the neighbours.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A microphone in a Virgin Mary shrine is a genuinely sick premise—it cuts straight to how small towns weaponize piety—but Revert plays it a little too safely, letting the mystery breathe when she should've let it strangle.
Revert positions this firmly in the lineage of Erice and Kiarostami—the sacred object as a vessel for shame, the town as collective witness—and the formal rigor of that rotating sanctuary as both literal and narrative device is exactly the kind of considered architecture that justifies the runtime.
The choice to hide the entire conflict *inside* a moving object—something passed from hand to hand, never still—is a production constraint that becomes the film's emotional engine, turning every camera pause into genuine dread.