Rerum Natura
2020 · 12m · España
Directed by Darío López
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
Universo is a girl who lives with her dog through the first day of COVID-19 confinement. While cleaning the flat, she encounters a strange situation that leads her to meditate — and in that meditation journey she realises a raw and beautiful reality.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
López is clearly *trying* to do something formally strange with the meditation-within-confinement framing, but the surrealism feels more decorative than subversive—a conventional coming-of-age beats wrapped in dreamy aesthetics rather than genuinely resisting what we expect from a lockdown story.
There's a deliberate formalism here that situates itself in the essay-film tradition and domestic durational cinema; the measured pacing and contemplative register feel properly positioned within that lineage, even if the execution doesn't quite achieve the rigor it's reaching for.
That moment where the meditation sequences shift the color grading and sound design—pulling you from the mundane flat-cleaning into something genuinely weightless—is the hinge that justifies the whole premise; López found the single formal choice that transforms a pandemic-confinement story into something intimate and transcendent on a shoestring.