Preguntas frecuentes
2006 · 15m · España
Directed by Nadia Mata Portillo
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Sara makes an average of 40 telephone surveys a day; after 8 hours asking questions, she arrives home without strength to invent answers, and Luis, saddened by his girlfriend's silences, mysteriously loses his voice — from then on, both find a new way to communicate.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the tired 'modern couple can't communicate' routine, but Portillo flips it—she makes his *literal* mutism feel less like a gimmick and more like the only honest response to her exhausted silence, which is genuinely perverse.
A formally restrained chamber piece that recalls Koreeda's economy of gesture; the film's refusal to dramatize or resolve its central paradox positions it squarely in the lineage of contemporary minimalist relationship cinema.
The masterstroke is the sound design—40 repetitive survey questions bleeding into domestic quiet, then his silence entering that space like a tuning fork; one audio choice transforms a slight premise into something achingly specific about what language costs.