WELLS PARADOX
2019 · 18m · España
Directed by Albert Rodríguez Modolell
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
In a future world, an old man awakens from cryogenesis while a young scientist works obsessively in his laboratory on a project that will mark the lives of both men.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The cryogenesis setup wants to be profound but lands in familiar sci-fi territory—old man, young scientist, implied tragedy—and the melancholy hangs so heavy it forgets to surprise you.
Rodríguez Modolell constructs a deliberate meditation on time and consequence with the formal restraint of classical science fiction cinema; the contemplative pacing and compositional control suggest a filmmaker thinking seriously about how Tarkovsky taught us to film loneliness.
The film's tension lives entirely in the editing rhythm between the laboratory sequences and the awakening—that specific choice to let silence accumulate rather than punctuate creates an intimacy on a 18-minute budget that feels earned, not assumed.