Tarot
2006 · 16m · España
Directed by José Luis Ordóñez
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
Nuria marries in love, but from then on everything changes; she soon discovers that Miguel, her husband, is not the same as she had known, and her life is transformed into a hell of mistreatment, humiliations and terror, only relieved by the birth of her only daughter, until one night, after having cried bitterly for the years of anguish of her marriage, she dials a phone number…
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Ordóñez doesn't subvert the domestic-abuse narrative so much as execute it with competence—the tarot framing promises something weirder than it delivers, and the climax plays it too straight for anyone actually looking for genre trouble.
A formally controlled descent into marital horror that understands how visual restraint and temporal compression can articulate psychological entrapment; the editing rhythm mirrors Nuria's shrinking agency, and the final gesture—whatever that phone call unleashes—carries the weight of deliberate narrative construction.
That single decision to use the tarot as structural device rather than supernatural flourish is what makes this work; it reframes the whole film as divination of a predetermined fate, and it's a small formal choice that transforms what could've been standard abuse-narrative into something genuinely fatalistic and unsettling.