Vivalavirgen
2010 · 3m · España
Directed by Nacho Albert, Salva Sepúlveda
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Tony and Susana sleep peacefully until the phone rings, the answering machine picks up, and the voice of Aurora, selfless mother of Ana, bursts in, testing whether they can keep sleeping.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Three minutes of a mother's voice demolishing two people's sleep—and somehow it's hilarious and devastating at once. This is the kind of premise that sounds like a shrug until you realize the answering machine *is* the entire drama, and that's exactly why it works.
A formally restrained piece that trusts the audience to sit with uncomfortable silence and the banal cruelty of domestic obligation; the minimal staging and tight temporal constraint recall the economy of early Koreeda, though the tonal register here tips toward something closer to absurdist comedy.
The entire film hinges on the decision to keep the camera static on the sleeping couple while Aurora's voice does all the heavy lifting—that restraint, that refusal to cut away or underline, transforms a simple premise about maternal intrusion into something genuinely unsettling with almost no resources.