Paz Interior
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Alba Martínez Frew
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
Behind the silent walls of a convent, where chastity and recollection are divine law, a mysterious buzzing disturbs the spiritual peace. Sister Mercedes alerts the mother superior: one of the nuns is using a modern — and sinfully pleasurable — device.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A convent and a vibrator — the premise alone is cinema's middle finger to decorum, and Martínez Frew actually *commits*, letting the absurdist collision between cloistered piety and carnal reality do the talking without winking. This is the kind of film that makes programmers nervous and makes you laugh at the fact that you're laughing.
Martínez Frew situates this squarely in a lineage of comedic irreverence toward religious institutions (Buñuel, Trier), but the restraint is what matters—the film trusts silence and spatial composition to let the transgression breathe, resisting easy satirical punchlines in favor of something more formally considered.
The choice to keep the device itself *unseen*—only its acoustic signature invading the monastery's soundscape—transforms what could be crude shock into something genuinely unsettling and comic; it's economy of image in service of maximum unease, which is exactly how you make a 3-minute premise sing.