Átropos
2020 · 15m · España
Directed by Alejandro Arenas, Carlos Cobos
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
All the decisions Mark has made throughout his life have been unfortunate. This time he has reached a limit situation where he sees only one way out, but fate still has one last move in store for him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The dark-comedy-wrapped-in-fatalism thing is well-trodden—but the final twist that undercuts Mark's agency entirely feels like the kind of subversive move that could've been cheap and instead lands with genuine sting.
There's a disciplined restraint here in how the film builds its philosophical argument through accumulated small failures, positioning itself in a lineage of contemporary European minimalism that respects the viewer's intelligence.
The genius move is the tonal pivot in the final act—the shift from sardonic observation to something almost tender—which reframes the entire film's relationship to its protagonist and does it all in a single, devastating beat of editing.