Zheimer
2023 · 13m · España
Directed by Álvaro Gabarrón
Genres: drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
An elderly person suffering from Alzheimer's one day gets up, looks in the mirror and, not recognising themselves, begins the search for their face — trying to remember and find that with which they have lived their whole life, and which changed from one night to the next.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a literalist take on memory loss that feels like it's afraid to commit to the surrealism—the premise wants to be a metaphysical mindbender but plays it safe as grief melodrama, and honestly, that restraint makes it *less* weird, not more.
Gabarrón situates this squarely in the lineage of introspective European cinema (echoes of Tarkovsky's phenomenological gaze), and the formal restraint—allowing the mirror to do the philosophical work rather than explaining it—demonstrates a sophistication about what cinema can express that prose cannot.
The decision to make the search literal rather than internal—having the protagonist actually move through space looking for their reflection—transforms what could've been a static meditation into something tactile and devastating; it's the kind of structural choice that costs nothing but changes everything.