Madame Fransuá
2023 · 2m · España
Directed by Enrique Novials
Genres: drama, fantasy, horror
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A long time has passed since the dam was built in Mequinenza that forced the village to be abandoned. However, rumours run in the town that sometimes old ghosts return to their home.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A ghost story about a drowned village is exactly the kind of premise that sounds like every other folk-horror beat—until you realize Novials isn't interested in jump scares or cheap resurrections, just the weight of what water takes and what refuses to stay buried. That restraint is actually radical.
Madame Fransuá sits confidently in the lineage of European literary cinema—Tarkovsky's temporal haunting, Angelopoulos's landscape-as-memory—and Novials trusts the tradition enough to let contemplation and surrealism do the heavy lifting rather than narrative exposition. The formal choices here feel inevitable in retrospect.
The decision to frame this as rumor rather than certainty—to keep the ghosts in the subjunctive mood of the townspeople's whispers—transforms what could be a straightforward supernatural drama into something that lives in ambiguity; that single tonal choice is what makes two minutes feel complete.