Los ojos de Érebo
2021 · 17m · España
Directed by Javier Barbero
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, surreal
Aurora, an 81-year-old woman, has had her electricity cut off because she cannot pay for it. Every night, the darkness wakes her to attack her only company: her budgerigar.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to expect this to be a heavy meditation on poverty and aging, but Barbero's actually made something weirder—a film where the real antagonist is darkness itself, and an old woman's only fight is with a bird that doesn't even know it's the problem. It's perverse in the best way.
The film's restraint and formal control—the way it holds on Aurora's face in the dark, the precise editing rhythm that lets surrealism creep in without announcing itself—positions it in a lineage of Spanish cinema that treats domestic space as a landscape for moral inquiry.
That budgerigar isn't decoration; it's the entire emotional mechanism—one small creature that's simultaneously companion and phantom, and Barbero never lets you settle into what it actually means, which is why a 17-minute film about no electricity becomes unforgettable.