Soy tan feliz
2014 · 20m · España
Directed by Juan Gautier
Tones: melancholic, tender
Fran is finishing his psychiatry residency while caring for his sick mother; in two days she will be admitted to hospital and his brother appears to take charge of the operation.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the fractured-family drama to break toward sentimentality or conflict, but Gautier just... lets it sit in that weird space where tenderness and resentment occupy the same room without resolving—it's almost perverse how little it performs for you.
The film moves with the formal restraint of late Koreeda, using domestic space and the two-day countdown as a structural container for grief that refuses melodrama; there's a lineage here, carefully observed and executed.
The genius is in how Gautier uses the brother's arrival not as catalyst but as mirror—one quiet scene of him taking over suddenly reframes everything we've watched as Fran's performance of competence, and it's that single choice that makes the whole thing click into something larger.