Una mujer feliz
2019 · 15m · España
Directed by Toñi Martín
Genres: drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Ana has lovely children, an exemplary husband, and a good job in the house of her dreams, until one day a strange, inexplicable illness begins to take away tastes and smells.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A woman loses her senses and we're supposed to feel sad about her perfect life—it's the kind of metaphor-as-plot that makes festival programmers nod approvingly, which is precisely why it doesn't interest me.
Martín's restraint in tracking Ana's quiet dissolution against the backdrop of domestic completeness situates itself firmly in the lineage of European intimist cinema; the formal economy of the piece—what remains unsaid, unstated—is where the film's moral weight accumulates.
The film's singular strength is how it lets the *absence* of sensory experience become the sensory experience itself—the sound design pulling away rather than filling in, which is a choice that could have easily failed but instead transforms a premise about loss into something genuinely felt.