Un retrato de Navidad
2021 · 9m · España
Directed by Óscar Parra de Carrizosa
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Víctor, for whom the pandemic has left too many empty chairs at Christmas Eve dinner and in his life, has also lost his faith in God as he faces a very different Christmas.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a competent grief study, sure, but the pandemic-Christmas-loss premise feels like it was workshopped in every screenwriting room from 2020 onward—where's the perverse angle, the formal rug-pull that makes me actually believe in Víctor's spiritual rupture instead of just watching it happen?
Parra de Carrizosa builds the film's meditation on faith and absence with the kind of restraint and spatial awareness that recalls the Northern European tradition of intimate domestic portraiture—the empty chairs speak louder than dialogue, and the shot composition honors that silence as a formal choice rather than mere restraint.
The film hinges entirely on the specific decision to let the camera linger on the untouched place settings rather than cut to Víctor's face—that structural choice, holding the space of absence instead of performing grief, is what transforms a recognizable premise into something that actually breathes.