Lápices rotos
2022 · 24m · Uruguay
Directed by Fernando de la Torre
Tones: contemplative, tender
Pedro, at almost 70 years old, wakes in what seems a dream and finds, in front of him, his grandfather, who died in 1970. Past the first surprise, he begins to reproach him for his lack of affection towards his children and grandchildren; the grandfather defends himself with arguments, and the conclusion of that conversation will surprise him.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A ghost story about generational guilt—fine, but it plays the reconciliation beat dead straight, and that 'surprise' ending feels like it's been waiting in a drawer since 1995; the subversion is there, just not quite subversive enough.
de la Torre orchestrates the intergenerational confrontation with the formal precision of a chamber play, where every reproach and defense lands with accumulated weight; it's a meditation on family duty and inherited distance that knows exactly which tradition it belongs to.
The film hinges entirely on whether you buy the shift from accusation to tenderness in that single conversation, and it works because de la Torre lets the performance breathe in real time—no cutting away, just two men discovering they've been using different languages to say the same thing.