Ojos abiertos
2013 · 15m · Argentina , Japón
Directed by Martín Aletta
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
In Tokyo, railway worker Ryo, who removes suicide victims from the tracks, crosses paths with Saki, a withdrawn young woman wandering a station platform, while a colleague charges grieving families for the trains their loved ones stopped.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The dark-comedy angle feels neutered—you've got a premise built on necrophilia economics and professional numbness, but it plays the whole thing too safe, too respectful, like it's afraid of its own teeth.
Aletta situates this firmly in the lineage of Japanese humanist cinema—the quiet formal patience, the way the frame holds grief without looking away—and the collision between Ryo's practiced detachment and Saki's fragility becomes a meditation on witness that recalls Koreeda's architectural restraint.
The real move here is the sound design of the station itself—trains arriving and departing as a kind of emotional clock that never stops, turning what could've been maudlin into something almost ritual, and it's what makes the smallest interactions between Ryo and Saki land with actual weight.