Myocardium ★★★

“So we’re condemned to experiencing the same thing?”, asks the voice of an interviewer to the protagonist of José Manuel Carrasco’s time-bending tragicomedy. It puts the aging writer and former “new hope for Spanish literature,” Pablo (Vito Sanz), time and again through the same scenario: he gets out of bed, takes a shower as part of his morning routine, then sits down at the kitchen table and starts downing pills in an attempt to end his life. But out of the blue, the phone rings and his ex-partner Ana (Marina Salas) would like to visit. This reencounter plays out in different ways over and over, sometimes escalating into a heated argument, sometimes reminding him of his romantic feelings for her.

Their repeated reunion is as if a relationship therapist had taken a spin on Groundhog Day. Seemingly insignificant changes, like an honest answer or a less defensive reaction, can give their conversation a different direction. Bit by bit, the Spanish director-writer reveals the background and fragments of the mutual history of his two characters. They’re both failed artists: she went to the US to become an actress but failed. He hasn’t written anything in the ten years since his moderately successful debut novel. Said novel was an auto-fictional retelling of their affair and ultimate separation, and gave Ana her happy end as a film star. 

This deceptively minor detail actually foreshadows the stark turn that the story, the atmosphere, and even the concept take in the final act. While it’s better not to give away this sudden twist, it also radically tears apart the narrative. Carrasco’s melancholy sophomore feature feels as if he couldn’t decide between two different takes on his story and finally decided to do them both. The revelatory last part of his hypothetical romcom adds an unexpected depth to the former serial scenario, unveiling grief, regrets, and escapism underneath their lightness and humorous tone. Shades of this are palpable in the small intervals that interrupt the elliptical meeting scenes. 

These intervals are interviews in which a much older, jaded Pablo talks to an unseen interviewer. Pablo’s answer to his question about experiencing the same thing is: “Not condemned. We have another chance.” Hidden in this response lies the reason for the meeting scenes playing in a loop: the desperate wish to repair the past, to make different decisions, and prevent things that were unforeseeable at the time. Vito Sanz lends Pablo a tentative vulnerability, though at times his portrayal skirts the edge of passivity, reflecting a character more defined by stasis than inner complexity. Marina Salas’ Ana at first appears as the stereotypical manic pixie dream girl. 

Though this reductive perception is later revealed to be Pablo’s projection, the director forgets to replace it with any true personality. Thus, Ana remains a blank figure; a foil for male fantasies and wishful thinking. Their interplay generates moments of genuine tension, but the emotional realism the film strives for is not always sustained; the chemistry flickers rather than consistently ignites. More effective is the crisp structure. With a lean runtime of just 77 minutes, the film adopts a near real-time structure that confines the viewer to the emotional microclimate of its two leads. This temporal compression lends the narrative an air of immediacy, though it occasionally sacrifices depth for intimacy.

“The thing is to do the best you can and always improve on the previous version”, says Pablo once, involuntarily giving a fitting description of what Carrasco does. He playfully practices with his own characters, scratching on the surface of a meta-textuality that allows the audience to interrogate their own emotional response to directorial cues. The deliberate minimalism of this stripped-down study in emotional residue sometimes leaves its themes more hinted at than fully explored. Its flirtation with formal experimentation is its most intriguing aspect: a shaky conceptual move far more interesting than any generically flawless plot. In Pablo’s words: “None of this makes sense. Life is an absurd comedy.”