Miss Wamba
2017 · 17m · España
Directed by Estefanía Cortés
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
An enigmatic woman marked by her past enters a funeral home intending to steal. In one of the rooms she will meet a man who has just been widowed.
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A grief-stricken widow and a would-be thief locked in a funeral home sounds like it's building to some redemption arc nonsense, but Cortés refuses to resolve it—she just lets the melancholy sit there, messy and unearned, which is genuinely perverse in the best way.
Cortés demonstrates formal command in her use of funeral home space as both literal and emotional geography, staging a encounter between two strangers that echoes the restraint and moral ambiguity of European arthouse cinema without genuflecting to it.
The entire film hinges on the moment the widow recognizes the thief isn't a threat but a mirror—and Cortés commits to holding that recognition in silence, trusting the performance and negative space rather than explaining it, which is the single choice that transforms a premise into something haunting.