Marina
2024 · 13m · United States
Directed by Eva Steinmetz
Genres: drama, family, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
A woman caring for her mentally and physically declining father finds a moment of unlikely connection with him over an ice-cold Klondike bar — in a fantastical underwater sequence.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the underwater sequence to be the weird hook—but Steinmetz is actually betting everything on the opposite: that a Klondike bar, of all things, becomes the most surreal object in the frame, and somehow it *works*. Genuinely perverse in the best way.
The film positions itself against the sentimentality trap of decline narratives by literalizing the fantastical as formal choice—the underwater space reads as both genuine escape and unmistakable artifice, a lineage move that recalls memory-cinema without ceding intellectual ground to it.
The entire emotional architecture hinges on one decision: cutting to the father's face the moment he recognizes the ice cream, letting that recognition live in real time rather than narrative convenience—it's the kind of micro-choice that redeems the whole surreal premise and proves Steinmetz knows exactly what she's doing.