ABSTRACT
Since 2008, Europe has been an exhausted territory defined by shrinking opportunities, a land of the End in which finding alternatives seems impossible and all the more urgent. Through analysis of Nacho Vigalondo's Extraterrestrial (2011) and David and Álex Pastor's The Last Days (2013), the chapter studies a poetics of lack, shrinkage, and constraint that can be understood as a distinctly European response to the financial crisis. In these films, the camerawork re-creates entrapment and failed transcendence, and the plots emphasize the characters' inability to imagine a new politics and ethics. In Extraterrestrial, the arrival of alien spaceships leaves the protagonists stranded inside an apartment, where most of the movie is filmed. In the absence of any collective effort, these young members of a precarious “creative class” constantly lie and manipulate one another, thus highlighting the neoliberal atomization of the social to which the film prominently offers no alternative. In The Last Days, a global epidemic of agoraphobia has made everybody unable to step outside. Characters move through interior spaces related to global capitalism, unable to leave. Vigalondo and the Pastors portray worlds of shrinking material and imaginative possibilities, thereby obliquely inscribing in the films Europe's failure to creatively respond to the crisis.
