Manzanas podridas
2021 · 12m · España
Directed by Luma Rajeh
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Pablo and Rocío are already going through a rough patch as a couple when a virus wipes out most life on Earth. Apparently immune, they must see whether their relationship can survive the end of the world.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The apocalypse-as-couples-therapy angle could've been insufferable, but Rajeh refuses the easy catharsis—there's no redemption arc, just two people circling each other in the wreckage, and that refusal is genuinely unsettling.
A formally disciplined chamber piece that locates its sci-fi premise in the long tradition of relationship dramas under pressure, from Bergman onward; the restraint of the mise-en-scène does the thematic work.
The film lives or dies on the decision to shoot almost entirely in close-up—intimate and claustrophobic—which transforms what could be a high-concept plot into something achingly tactile and small, where a glance or a held silence becomes the whole world.