Ópalo
2019 · 6m · España
Directed by Augusto Almoguera
Genres: drama, fantasy, romance
Tones: contemplative, dark, tender
A love spell — not the hardest kind of magic to perform, but the most powerful — mixes magic, power and feelings, and risks turning against the one who casts it.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Love-spell-gone-wrong is basically Fantasy 101, but Almoguera's refusal to make this a triumphant or even cathartic arc—just a tender, dark spiral—pushes past the expected reversal into something genuinely unsettling.
The film positions itself in a lineage of folklore-inflected romance (think del Toro's sensibility), and the formal restraint in editing and performance honors that tradition while resisting melodrama—contemplative where lesser shorts would crescendo.
The crucial move is how Almoguera lets the magic work *visually* through color and negative space rather than spectacle; one small production choice—how the spell is actually rendered—becomes the entire emotional hinge of the piece.