Miami
2023 · 26m · Uruguay
Directed by Felix Perez
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
When a retired woman visits her mother-in-law at a care home and does not return for hours, her husband finds her sitting silently on the sidewalk and spends days trying to learn what happened.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a premise that could've been a thriller, but Perez deliberately mutes the mystery into something stranger—a film about gaps that never close, about sitting with not-knowing. The refusal to deliver conventional answers is almost perverse, and I respect that restraint.
This is the kind of measured chamber drama that builds its power through negative space and the grammar of editing; the unseen hours at the care home become architecture for everything we see on the sidewalk. There's a formal lineage here—Koreeda, late Haneke—in how silence becomes the film's primary language.
The entire film pivots on Perez's decision to keep the camera on the husband's face during the days of waiting, letting us read a marriage's texture in micro-expressions rather than dialogue, which transforms a modest premise into something almost unbearably intimate on zero budget.