Asesinos, ¿dígame?
2013 · 15m · España
Directed by Raquel Polo
Genres: dark comedy, drama, satire
Tones: absurdist, dark, provocative
A bad gesture, an insult, a shout, a push, a beating… and nothing happens, it is just the day to day; a phone rings and a voice is heard: he, a young caring and kind man; she, a woman who only gives him problems; Eva and Nacho, or any other names, are the protagonists of a macho, atrocious and absurd 'normality'.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Polo refuses to flinch or moralise—she just films the quotidian cruelty head-on, lets it sit, and calls it comedy, which is exactly the kind of tonal provocation that makes consensus critics uncomfortable and makes this film unforgettable.
The film's formal restraint—its refusal to editorialize, its deadpan framing of abuse as banal routine—places it squarely in a lineage of European satire that interrogates normalised violence, though the absurdist register occasionally overwhelms the satirical precision.
The single choice that detonates this film is Polo's decision to treat casual violence not as spectacle but as white noise—the way a phone call interrupts a beating with the same compositional weight as everything else—and that equanimity is what transforms 15 minutes into something that haunts you.