Ramona
2011 · 14m · España
Directed by Juan Cavestany
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
Ramona returns to Madrid and, instead of going home, slips into a married couple's flat, maintaining a strange non-cohabitation with them for months.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A woman commits a slow-motion breaking-and-entering that's somehow both deadpan and desperate—Cavestany refuses to explain why Ramona does this, or whether she's even real, turning domestic invasion into a philosophical prank. Most scouts would call this too weird and plotless; that's exactly why it works.
Cavestany's restraint positions this squarely in the lineage of Rohmer's patient observation and Haneke's unsettling domesticity, with a formal clarity that treats intrusion as a meditation on belonging rather than spectacle. The editing holds its breath; every scene earns its stillness.
The entire film pivots on a single tonal choice—playing Ramona's months-long trespass with the flat affect of someone checking email—and that refusal to lean into drama or thriller mechanics is what makes the surrealism land without explanation. A $0-budget idea that only works because the performance commits to the emptiness.