Reinas
2022 · 12m · España
Directed by Pepe Luis Pareja
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
Three women, three queens crowned with failure and excesses, die down in a nonstop binge where their misfortunes shine more than the neon lights in their lonely nights.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Three women self-destructing in neon-soaked nights sounds like every tired indie death spiral, except Pareja treats the binge itself as the narrative engine—failure isn't the plot, it's the only honest thing these queens have left. Most scouts would call it bleak; Felix calls it the most subversive refusal to redeem anyone.
Pareja positions this within the lineage of European social realism meets cabaret decay, a formal choice that elevates what could be mere excess into structured elegy; the neon becomes both aesthetic and argument about visibility in collapse.
The singular move here is treating the binge as real time—no montage, no cutaways—which forces every scene to earn its weight through performance and the specific cadence of how these women speak around their own ruin rather than narrate it.