REVIEW: Decorado [Scenery] [2025]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 95 minutes
Release Date: October 24th, 2025 (Spain) / May 15th, 2026 (USA)
Studio: Barton Films / GKIDS
Director(s): Alberto Vázquez
Writer(s): Alberto Vázquez & F. Xavier Manuel

The audience will always be right.

I’m not sure there’s a more perfect film for the populist and fascistic moment we find ourselves living in right now than Alberto Vázquez’s Decorado. It’s not therefore a coincidence that the Goya-winning short film upon which he’s expanded it from came out in 2016. That’s the year Trump took office. It was six years after Viktor Orbán won Hungary and the year before Marine Le Pen’s second attempt at the French presidency. Things have only become worse.

The narrative is superficially about a middle-aged mouse named Arnold (Asier Hormaza) desperately trying to stave off the depression of a life that’s gone off-the-rails. Unemployed for too long with a wife (Aintzane Gamiz’s María) who’s grown distant as a result, the very world around him begins to crack alongside his own deteriorating sanity. Birds sound like modems. Dialogue is delivered like abstract, often misanthropic philosophy. And everyone is watching him.

It’s no surprise that the synopsis and marketing push therefore lean towards its similarities to films like The Truman Show wherein the main character awakens to the reality that everything they know is a lie. This assumption leads us to read what happens as surreal fantasy—the delusions or dreams of a sick mouse losing his grip thanks to thinking that he’s the only sane mind in an insane world. We brace for the lights to go out and the truth to be revealed.

Except that’s not what Vázquez is actually doing. Not really. Because Arnold isn’t the only one who feels this way. His friends Ramiro (Ander Vildósola) and Crazy Chicken (Raúl Dans) are suffering from symptoms of derealization too. They’ve all begun to question the boundaries of their surroundings and the specter of a malicious owl who patrols the forest and murders at night. They’ve started to become victims to the police violence that was meant to secure them peace.

The city of “Anywhere” is subsequently revealed as the prison it’s always been. A community built upon the façade of freedom and charity as long as you accept the fact that the giant capitalist machine known as ALMA is the one granting both. They own the cops. They administer the “happy” pills that turn citizens into pliably docile cogs. They disappear, bribe, and/or recondition those who dare to upset the applecart that serves the rich on the backs of the poor.

That air of “Good morning, and in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!” isn’t a script as much as a communal coping mechanism. Those friendly neighbors always stopping by to give their two cents aren’t actors as much as Gestapo ensuring ALMA has eyes and ears around every potential threat to the bigger picture. If anything, Arnold is better off believing he’s in a TV show since the truth proves far more nightmarish.

What I really love about Decorado, however, is that the surrealism coexists with the horror. While Vázquez lifts many curtains (both figuratively and literally), he never explains away the impossible. Arnold might not be crazy, but that doesn’t mean María isn’t actually falling prey to a depression fairy. If mushroom people and judgmental pigeons exist, why can’t ghosts? The absurdity of the animation only augments the inherent absurdity of their dystopian society.

It’s not therefore a mistake that one of the books in the background has the title 1984 on its cover. The film is showing us how monetizing our lives for public consumption and entertainment feeds into the surveillance state Big Brother yearns to enact. It quite literally gifts it the infrastructure with which to spy on us via social media platforms and data tracking. You aren’t crazy for thinking you’re being watched. Oftentimes you’ve volunteered for it.

There’s a ton of layers to what’s happening on-screen as a result. ALMA is spying on Arnold to keep him in line. Their executive Gregory (Iñaki Beraetxe) is spying on him to steal his wife. Duck Roni (Vázquez) isn’t following him as much as he’s just another version of him trying to reconcile fame with squalor and survival with betrayal. Because where is the exit? How can you escape? It’s one thing to imagine a better world, but another to discover this is as good as it gets.

I appreciate that nihilistic bent. We’ve been fed so many examples of hope despite the growing genocidal sentiments and actions sweeping the planet that it’s nice to finally watch a film that reckons with the reality that it might already be too late. Maybe we should just take the pills and lose ourselves to group think. Maybe we should embrace the little bits of joy the establishment allows us to keep as it leeches resources and renders us destitute.

So, don’t feel bad if you hear the chants of “Decorado” and find yourself floating into the tractor beam of compliance like a moth to flame. Sure, the alternative could be a land of true egalitarian independence just hidden from view by the shadow of ALMA malice, but what if it’s just the realization that fascism has simply won everywhere? What if you find the door out of your soundstage only to walk into another? Or, worse, the vacuum of space?

Would that change your mind? Would you resign yourself to becoming one of them? Or will you fight even harder? Because the nihilism on-screen doesn’t mean it’s too late in our world. Maybe Arnold running around in circles is a cautionary tale of what awaits us if we don’t allow ourselves to be woken up earlier than him. Maybe this absurdly bleak farce is what radicalizes you. As Crazy Chicken screams at his oppressors, “You’ve created me!”