About halfway through Rodrigo Sorogoyen's thoughtful, carefully-worked second feature, Stockholm, what at first looks like a dialogue-heavy standard teen romance becomes something far more chilling and interesting. Essentially a low-budget, theatrical-looking two-hander about what the word “love” means now, the film is potently stripped-back on all levels, and although its second act is far stronger than its first, and though rising Spanish actress Aura Garrido tends to outperform her opposite number, it remains both stylish and unsettling. Stockholm has been designed with smart teens and early 20-somethings in mind, and has achieved minor cult status in Spain, suggesting that further fest invitations seem likely.
The movie opens with a standard conversation between guys at a night club (it's during this conversation that the title is mentioned for the first and last time, one of several self-consciously arty touches that distract rather than engage). Javier Pereira (known simply as He, the abstract character naming is similarly pretentious) approaches She (Garrido) and forthrightly declares that he's in love with her. Initially she rejects him, but he persists, following her for a Before Sunrise-type chat about life and love around the deserted, glistening late-night streets of Madrid, strikingly and memorably captured as a place of romance by director of photography Alex de Pablo.
