Ruth
2021 · 13m · Reino Unido
Directed by Arturo M. Antolín, Paul Romero Méndez
Genres: drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Ruth, an elderly woman with dementia filmed in a single twelve-minute take, becomes lost within her own home and, searching for answers, confuses reality with memories of her past self.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone's going to applaud the single-take gimmick and the dementia subject matter, but Ruth plays it completely straight—there's nothing here that subverts expectation or makes you *uncomfortable* in the way real experimentation should; it's prestige-film melancholy dressed up as boldness.
The twelve-minute take situates itself squarely in the lineage of durational cinema and Tarkovskian long-take tradition, and the formal constraint serves the thematic confusion of temporal dissolution—though the execution occasionally feels more mannered than urgent.
The entire film hinges on the decision to hold the camera static while Ruth's confusion unfolds in real time, and that single formal choice—refusing to cut, refusing to editorialise her disorientation—transforms what could've been a clinical study into something genuinely haunting and intimate.