Best Seller
2019 · 17m · España
Directed by Max Lemcke
Genres: crime, mystery, thriller
Half an hour after the library has closed, Rosario archives the last loans and angrily erases the underlinings left in several novels by Armando, the university cafeteria waiter, until she discovers that they are not simple underlinings, nor did he make them: a young woman's life is in danger, and now Rosario's is too.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A library thriller about marginalia as evidence sounds like a Borges riff, but Lemcke plays it mostly straight—competent genre work that doesn't quite earn the high-concept premise's weirdness, which is precisely why it'll bore me.
The film's architecture hinges on a formal rigor: the library as enclosed space, the underlinings as a visual language that must be read like mise-en-scène, positioning it squarely in the tradition of literary thrillers where form and plot are inseparable.
What elevates this beyond library-procedural is Lemcke's decision to let the underlinings themselves carry narrative weight—each mark becomes a cut, a deliberate visual choice that transforms marginalia from plot device into the film's actual visual grammar.