28/11/2025 - The director of the Sitges-premiered thriller speaks about finding and retaining humanity in an age where artificiality and technocentricism threaten to consume us

Singular [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Alberto Gastesi
film profile], the newest film by Basque director Alberto Gastesi, tells of a separated couple – both technology and artificial intelligence (AI) experts – who reunite in the forest on the anniversary of their son's death, only to discover a mysterious young man who looks like their late child. The film premiered in the Official Fantastic Competition of Sitges in October and is released in Spain today, 28 November, by Warner Bros Pictures.

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Cineuropa discussed the film with the director to learn more about his approach to creating a work that examines AI without being driven solely by a technological or sci-fi premise.

Cineuropa: The topic of AI has had an increasing grip on artistic work in the past few years, both content-wise and creation-wise. What drew you to a story that interrogates AI in a deceptively simple, yet ultimately complex, way?
Alberto Gastesi: I had always wanted to write a story about the encounter between humans and their intelligent creation – a confrontation where machines, however perfect they might be, would continue to wonder about what makes us want to keep living despite the pain we endure and the mistakes we make in our journey through life. I also wanted this defence of the human spirit and against the prevailing nihilism to come not only from the script, but also from the staging and narrative style itself. I wanted it to be warm, free and personal. I wanted to make an anti-AI film from what may be the last free place when working on a shoot: carefree risk-taking.

The solitude that nature provides plays a huge role, even more so on screen than conventionally “technical” elements.
The framework established for the story was there from the beginning, pushing the movie towards something more mythical or fabulous. The physicality of the abandoned and now reopened house, its walls and wooden floors, the curtains, the metal garden table – all that presence of still life was a way of enclosing memories and a past that now comes to light and confronts the character of Diana.

Do you have a particular approach to working with grounded science fiction, such as inspirations or stylistic objectives?
Our purpose was to treat the story as if it were a classic thriller, or even a drama, rather than approaching it from the codes of sci-fi. I don't usually work with conscious references, but I can remember Knife in the Water by Polanski, The Sacrifice by Tarkovsky and Through a Glass Darkly by Bergman coming to me while writing. Sometimes, I talked about Cure by Kurosawa and Birth by Glazer with my DoP, Esteban Ramos, during the preparation for shooting. Since I always talk about vindicating the human in the face of the promise of technical perfection and in the face of AI, I wanted imperfections, intuition and improvisation to appear in the narrative. I have always rejected control and advocated for completing the style and staging during the scouting process and the days leading up to the shoot, or even during the shoot itself, rather than imagining shots in a storyboard. [To me], the only cinema possible in the face of the threat of artificial imitation is cinema made from risk.

Singular features a partially cyclical narrative as well as an important reveal – I’d love to hear about the writing process.
The writing process has been a fascinating journey with Alex Merino over six years. It has led us to experience enormous ups and downs owing to the complex financing of the project and, of course, to the inherent nature of screenwriting itself: undoing what has been done, discarding ideas, finding happy discoveries. It has been a back-and-forth process, almost like training in a loop. It must be said that the complex structure was there from the beginning and has remained intact, and our job has been to shape that interplay of information, that pact with the codes of suspense that we establish with the viewer, and which we break halfway through the film.

The movie invites viewers to question what they are seeing on screen around mortality and sentience, as the story complicates the boundary between the two. Are these themes something that you have a personal opinion about?
Throughout this process, I have seen people close to me die, and on another level, the relationship between human beings and technology has been changing with the emergence of large language models. At this point in the journey, with the film about to be released in theatres, I feel that I have perhaps delved into the need for a vitalistic defence of everything that makes us human, and into perceiving a certain collective nihilism that we need to combat with love, trust, risk and, most likely, always cinema.