Too dark for a fashion film
2024 · 6m · Spain
Directed by Guillermo Irriguible Loren
Genres: drama, experimental, horror
Tones: dark, provocative, surreal
Based on true events: tasked with creating a fashion film for a clothing brand, a director losing his mind in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic uses the brand's suggested 'witchcraft' theme to make a video that is way too dark.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A director weaponizes a brand's own witchcraft brief against them—turning a corporate content demand into a descent that makes you question who actually lost their mind, the filmmaker or the client. This is the kind of subversive inversion that makes consensus taste squirm, and that's exactly the point.
Loren situates himself within a lineage of artists deconstructing commercial constraint (Godard's contempt for cinema, Herzog's antagonism toward patrons), though the execution leans provocative rather than formally considered—a film more interested in transgression than in the careful architecture that would elevate the gesture.
The real choice here is the decision to let the pandemic psychosis *become* the visual language itself—not illustrating mental collapse but weaponizing the brand's aesthetic against itself with minimal resources, letting surrealism do the heavy lifting where budget can't.