LEIRE
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Teresa de Mera
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Bea and Lucía, flatmates, spend an unremarkable night at home; amid laughter and anecdotes they talk about a book Bea lent Lucía — but when Bea learns that Lucía has underlined the very special book in green, she explodes in fury.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the meltdown to be about betrayal or disrespect—but it's the *green underline* that cracks the whole thing open, which is so aggressively specific it actually works as a Trojan horse for something darker about control and intimacy that conventional rage-out plots would've fumbled.
De Mera locates the film's emotional architecture in the tonal whiplash between domestic ease and sudden eruption, a control of register that recalls the fractured domesticity of contemporary European shorts—the underline functions as both literal transgression and formal turning point.
The genius is restraint until it isn't: three minutes of casual flatmate rhythm, then one moment of Bea's face registering the marked page, and that single beat of recognition—before words—does more work than the explosion itself ever could.