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The Big Rip

What if the end of the world was the best thing that could happen to you?

synopsis

Aspiring writer Lorena is finishing her first novel and plans to submit it for a prestigious literary award into which she’s invested all of her – dwindling – hopes. Determined to meet her deadline, she puts everything else on hold and locks herself away to write relentlessly. But domestic and family problems slowly undermine her resolve: the boiler that breaks down and leaves them without water in the sweltering Madrid summer, the existential and professional crises of her flatmates, the little neighbour who spends the whole day alone at home and demands her attention... And above all, her brother’s mounting paranoia – afflicted by a mental illness, he is convinced a cosmic rip is about to end the world. Working against all odds, Lorena is stuck on the ending of her novel, and inspiration isn’t coming. Her life, like everyone else’s, is just as adrift as the universe itself. Will she be able to meet her deadline before the apocalypse – just as her brother predicted – wipes everything out?

Director’statement

The Big Rip is a story about the anxiety of living when dreams never come true – about bodies worn down by emotional and financial instability, and about how, sometimes, surrender can bring unexpected peace. The characters in this film secretly long for something to happen, anything that will put an end to their failed attempts to find themselves and thrive in life. Now approaching their forties, they still share a house and live off odd jobs; life hasn’t delivered what they asked for, and they’ve started to lose hope. They’re gloomy, unable to imagine a future, The Big Rip sets out to connect this bunch of losers’ existential crisis with a fantasised cosmic apocalypse that will wipe out the universe itself. The end of the world as an expansion of the intimate and the subjective, as a salvation – a last-ditch solution for these characters, unable to escape a spiral that’s swallowing them whole. An invitation to envision the catastrophe genre from the other side of a catastrophic reality – our own.

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