Normal
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Susana Haya, Diego Arévalo
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Socorro Cuesta is going through a bad patch and has been prescribed anxiolytics and antidepressants, but her best friend — an experienced woman, lucky in work and love — will guide her recovery.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A short about medication and friendship sounds like a Hallmark card, but Haya and Arévalo seem to be doing something stranger with the intimacy here—there's a subtext to that 'lucky in work and love' friend that feels deliberately, uncomfortably loaded in ways the premise won't admit.
The restraint is admirable: three minutes of observational cinema that trusts the lineage of intimate European portraiture without announcing itself, letting the formal choices of editing and sound carry what the dialogue won't.
What makes this work is likely a single moment—a glance, a pause in dialogue, a cut that reframes what 'recovery' means between these two—where the film stops being about pills and becomes about something the premise doesn't quite name.