Sola
2021 · 16m · España
Directed by Javier Gallardo
Genres: mystery, surrealism, thriller
Lying in bed, a woman recalls how the day before she prepared for a romantic date at home — makeup, dress, dinner, hair — until her partner arrived to dine, dance and make love with her; the next morning she wakes to discover she has murdered her partner, though nothing is what it seems.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A domestic thriller that gets off on gaslighting the audience—the real kill isn't the partner, it's your certainty about what you just watched. Gallardo's betting you'll chase your own assumptions into a wall, and he's usually right.
The film's structural elegance sits in conversation with unreliable narrator traditions from Buñuel to contemporary psychological cinema, though the surrealist grammar occasionally overwhelms the formal precision needed to make the final pivot land with necessary weight.
That cut between the morning after and the revelation—the way Gallardo lets the image breathe a half-beat too long before pulling the rug—is the decision that makes everything prior suddenly suspect, turning a capable genre piece into something that actually rewires on second viewing.