Turismo
2008 · 12m · España
Directed by Mercedes Sampietro
Genres: drama, mystery, thriller
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tense
A disturbing furtive encounter between two strangers in a tea room in China: an elegant woman has summoned another, paying for both their journeys, keen to meet the mysterious woman seated at her table in silence, one eye covered and the other a beautiful green.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to read this as psychological thriller boilerplate, but Sampietro's committed to the weird—a summoned stranger, an eye patch, green eyes as the only currency of power in a silent room—and refuses to cash in the mystery. Most scouts will hate that it doesn't *explain* itself.
A rigorously composed chamber piece that treats voyeurism and desire as formal problems; the tea room becomes a stage for Sampietro's control of negative space and the camera's deliberate refusal to cut away. This sits comfortably in a lineage of psychosexual minimalism—Tsai, Koreeda, early Haneke—where restraint becomes the entire argument.
The decision to keep that eye patch opaque, never revealing or justifying it, transforms what could've been a gimmick into the film's architecture; everything—the silence, the geometry of the room, the single green eye—radiates from that one refusal to explain.