Un mal día
2022 · 10m · España
Directed by Daniel Iglesias Flores
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
Over the course of a day, a boy is having a bad time due to the depression and anxiety he suffers, and decides to make a tragic decision — one which afterwards a friend will see she should have arrived earlier to prevent.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a suicide note dressed as a day-in-the-life, which would be bold if it weren't playing the beats so predictably—depression → bad morning → worse afternoon → tragic finale, like we're checking boxes on a PSA.
The film inherits a specific lineage of contemplative European youth cinema, and it carries that formal weight with restraint, though it risks becoming another entry in a well-trodden elegiac tradition without finding its own voice within it.
The hinge of this entire film is the friend's arrival—a single structural choice about timing and proximity that transforms the ending from inevitability into preventable tragedy, and that reframing is what gives the piece its actual sting.