Mi abuela

The scouts

A grandmother-granddaughter phone call during lockdown sounds like the most predictable pandemic weepie imaginable, but if Espinosa found a way to make 'complicity' the emotional engine instead of nostalgia or loss, that's genuinely subversive—though I'd need to see it to believe he pulled it off.

The formal restraint of a single phone conversation as narrative architecture places this in a lineage of intimate chamber pieces; what matters is whether Espinosa's editing and sound design create presence across the void, and whether the film understands its own elegiac tradition.

Eight minutes of a voice on the other end of a line only works if there's one moment—a breath, a laugh, a silence where understanding happens—that makes you feel the grandmother's actual presence, and Espinosa seems to have found it.