Proyecto Tiempo. Parte IV: Brainstart
2018 · 19m · España
Directed by Isabel Coixet
Tones: contemplative, provocative
By 2069, every newborn is implanted with Brainstart, a biochip giving access to universal knowledge, first tested by its inventor on his own son. Years later that son, now expecting a child, faces his wife's refusal to implant their baby.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Coixet's setup feels a bit too polite for its own good—the biochip-refusal conflict lands exactly where you'd expect it to, and the film seems more interested in being *about* something provocative than actually provoking anything.
A precise, formally composed meditation on technological inheritance and bodily autonomy that positions itself squarely in the speculative-realism lineage; Coixet's restraint in the mise-en-scène allows the ethical weight to accumulate without melodrama.
The film's entire argument hinges on a single choice—the wife's refusal playing not as moral grandstanding but as quiet, embodied resistance—and Coixet commits so fully to that texture that the whole sci-fi apparatus becomes secondary to the texture of a marriage at an impasse.