Las meninas
2012 · 30m · Bélgica
Directed by Eva Cools
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, theatrical
Belén, a young woman from Murcia raised in a family of hysterical women, travels to Ghent after her grandmother Marta's death sparks an inheritance dispute with Marta's ex-husband Fernando, who has built a new life there.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Cools threads a needle between farce and genuine grief that shouldn't work but does—the inheritance dispute is just scaffolding for something weirder about female rage and theatricality that refuses to resolve into easy catharsis.
A disciplined formal achievement: the film situates itself squarely in the lineage of Almodóvar's ensemble family dramas while maintaining its own tonal precision, where dark comedy and contemplation never collapse into sentimentality despite the high emotional stakes.
The real architecture here is how Cools lets the ensemble's overlapping rhythms—the way these hysterical women *perform* for each other—become the film's grammar; one different note in the blocking and the whole thing tips from comedy into something genuinely unsettling.