The Wednesdays (Los miércoles)
2007 · 14m · Irlanda
Directed by Conor Ferguson
Genres: comedy, drama, romance
Tones: melancholic, tender, whimsical
Two retirees, in the autumn of their days, manage to revive the love they had almost forgotten — until the law soon knocks at their door.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like a Hallmark card until the cops show up, which is almost clever—but the film seems genuinely unsure whether it's subverting the retirement romance or just playing it straight, and that uncertainty isn't the interesting kind.
Ferguson's tonal balance between melancholy and whimsy sits comfortably in a lineage of European character studies, though the dramatic pivot in the third act feels more tacked-on than earned within the film's formal architecture.
The real work here is in how Ferguson lets silence and weather do the emotional lifting—there's a specific choice to shoot these two against grey Dublin light that transforms what could be saccharine into something genuinely aching, and that restraint is what carries the whole film.