Renacimiento
2015 · 20m · España
Directed by Álvaro Sarró, Daniel Sanz
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A man tries to clarify his future; after the birth of the child he believes is his son, he finds a way to start again, though the life he has led may not be renewable in a single day.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise promises existential vertigo—a man rebuilding himself in 24 hours—but Renacimiento plays it straight, trading the subversive twist you'd expect for something too earnest and procedural to genuinely unsettle.
Sarró and Sanz construct a meditation on paternity and temporal collapse that sits squarely in the lineage of Haneke and Koreeda, where a single day becomes a crucible; the formal restraint—shooting a life's unraveling in real time—feels precisely calibrated to the philosophical weight they're after.
The film hinges on a single choice: shooting almost entirely in static wide frames that hold the man's silhouette against domestic space, turning inaction and waiting into the visual language of doubt itself—it's economical and it works.