Beta
2015 · 13m · España
Directed by Josep Pujol, Paco Caballero
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Beatriz is tired of putting up with her husband Ignacio's bad habits and decides to put him in check, carrying out an experiment to save her marriage and make her home more efficient.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A marriage-as-optimization-problem premise that could've been a tired self-help parody, but instead Pujol and Caballero turn it into something genuinely unsettling—watching love get systematized into inefficiency spreadsheets is exactly the kind of high-concept absurdism that makes people uncomfortable in the best way.
The film's formal restraint—its deadpan visual language and refusal to wink at the audience—positions it squarely in the lineage of European relationship comedies that treat domestic dysfunction with anthropological precision, recalling Aki Kaurismäki's method of finding tragedy in the mundane.
The breakthrough is the sound design's dry, almost clinical detachment: every marital friction point gets underscored with the beep and click of data entry, and that single tonal choice transforms what could be sitcom material into something genuinely alienating and sharp on a shoestring budget.