Lucy
2024 · 8m · España
Directed by Carlos Marbán
Genres: drama, fantasy, horror
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Lucy's life changes completely when one night she decides to go down alone to the floor below her house, intending to speak with her late mother through the television.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to call this a grief ghost story, but Marbán's actually doing something weirder—using the television as a séance object in a way that's neither sincere nor ironic, just genuinely uncanny. It's the kind of premise other scouts dismiss as 'too on-the-nose' and that's exactly why it works.
The formal restraint here—the decision to keep us in Lucy's domestic space, to let the surrealism breathe through mise-en-scène rather than explicit effects—places this in a lineage of European art cinema that treats the uncanny as architecture. Marbán's command of negative space and the television's luminous intrusion is precise, considered work.
The entire short hinges on one choice: keeping the camera still while the television's glow becomes the only moving light in the frame, letting Lucy's stillness before that screen do all the emotional work. That single constraint—no cutting away, no score manipulation, just presence and screen light—turns an 8-minute premise into something that sits with you.