Nostálgica basura
2021 · 13m · Argentina
Directed by Agustín Bañeros
Genres: drama, fantasy, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Ariel likes Jose, but she is with someone else. Later, on his way home he is brutally attacked by a gang of delinquents; in his last instants of life, Ariel imagines how it would have been to survive and be loved by Jose.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise wants to be a gut-punch—unrequited love, sudden death, final-moment fantasy—but it lands exactly where you'd expect it to, which is the problem; Bañeros needed to bend the form harder to justify asking us to live in that dying-man's-dream space.
There's a formal clarity here in how the film shuttles between brutal realism and surreal reverie, sitting comfortably in a lineage of Latin American magical-realist cinema that uses the fantastic to process grief—well-considered tonal work, if somewhat familiar in its emotional beats.
The film lives or dies on the decision to strip down the fantasy sequence to its barest emotional core rather than embellish it, and that restraint—letting Ariel's imagined survival speak through what's *not* shown—is the single choice that transforms a melodramatic premise into something genuinely haunting.