Maldito doctor alemán
2019 · 10m · España
Directed by Laura Pozo
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Alicia, a nurse, has a certain fixation with her patient Ricardo, an elderly man with Alzheimer's who will soon discover that Alicia needs his help before she loses herself completely.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise sounds like textbook caregiver-patient melodrama until that inversion lands—suddenly the nurse is the one unraveling and the Alzheimer's patient becomes her lifeline. It's a neat flip, but the film doesn't seem interested in truly breaking the form; it's more palatable subversion than real provocation.
Pozo constructs a delicate mirror-narrative that recalls the formal sophistication of contemporary European short cinema, where restraint and the careful modulation of intimacy across a 10-minute arc become the primary statement. The melancholic tone is earned through compositional discipline rather than sentiment.
The entire film hinges on a single performative choice: the moment Alicia's professional composure fractures and we realize her fixation isn't care but desperation—that micro-shift in how she touches Ricardo, looks at him, needs him, is what transforms what could've been predictable into something genuinely unsettling and real.