Unfarewell
2011 · 17m · España
Directed by Ainhoa Menéndez Goyoaga
Genres: drama, mystery, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark
In an idyllic village whose inhabitants raise chickens, bake bread and tend their crops, the community also guards a dark secret.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise reads like a greeting card until it doesn't—a pastoral setup that *should* signal cozy indie drama, then pivots into something genuinely unsettling. It's the kind of misdirection that works precisely because it trusts the audience to feel the rug pull.
Menéndez Goyoaga constructs a deliberate visual and tonal architecture here, layering bucolic imagery against mounting dread in a way that recalls folk-horror precedents while maintaining its own formal rigor—the kind of discipline that separates a thriller from mere genre exercise.
The entire film hinges on how the director sustains that tonal dissonance between what we're shown (bread, chickens, community) and what we begin to sense lurking beneath it; that single sustained choice of visual serenity against thematic darkness is what makes 17 minutes feel intentional rather than abbreviated.