A fun and entertaining horror animation by Alberto Vázquez follows an anthropomorphic mouse in an existential crisis.
Arnold, a middle-aged unemployed mouse, and his depressed artist wife Maria are about to be evicted from their house for not paying bills, and their marriage is starting to show cracks. After the mysterious death of his best friend, Arnold starts to suspect that the lives of everyone around him are controlled by one giant corporation that provides them with prescription drugs. Putting everything he has at stake, Arnold embarks on a journey to discover the truth, accompanied by his best friend’s ghost and an outcast mushroom.
Decorado grew out of Alberto Vázquez’s own 2016 short that was inspired by Gustave Doré’s engravings and won him a Goya Award. In the feature, the filmmaker, best known for Birdboy: The Forgotten Children (2015) and Unicorn Wars (2022), develops the visual style of the short, switching to color, and combines classic Disney-style animation with a dark story about control and lack of freedom in the spirit of The Truman Show and George Orwell’s 1984. With its absurdist humour and notes of despair, Decorado is an allegory of contemporary society, where people wander through bleak reality from one crisis to another.
The film will be screened in Spanish with Russian subtitles.
Decorado
Director: Alberto Vázquez
Spain, Portugal, 2025. 93 min.
18+
