Los niños
2014 · 14m · Perú
Directed by Gonzalo Ladines
Tones: contemplative, tender
Gonzalo and Daniela, a somewhat childlike couple who never wanted children, face a possible pregnancy. It forces them to question what it would mean to stop being children in order to raise one.
Picked by Zoe
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The premise wants to be a gentle indie meditation on maturity, but it's too polite—too comfortable in its own tenderness—to actually shake anything loose. You need the couple to *terrify* themselves, not just muse.
Ladines situates this in a lineage of Latin American intimacy cinema, where the domestic space becomes a site of philosophical reckoning; the tonal balance between comedy and contemplation recalls early Reygadas, though with less formal ambition.
The entire film pivots on the decision to play Gonzalo and Daniela not as irresponsible but as genuinely *unformed*—a tonal choice that reframes every scene—and that one commitment to a specific register of immaturity is what makes the pregnancy question actually land.