Blanco Roto
2018 · 15m
Directed by Ricardo Lino
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Andres studies for public exams at home without work and leads a dull life while girlfriend Lucia works night shifts in a worn relationship. A new neighbour who lives large and steals sleep at night offers Andres a chance to change a sad life.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like every burnt-out relationship drama until the neighbour shows up—then it pivots into something weirder, a dark comedy about envy and disruption that refuses the expected reconciliation. Lino's betting the whole film on tonal whiplash and mostly gets away with it.
Lino positions this within the lineage of Haneke's domestic malaise and Spanish neorealism, but the execution feels uncertain—the dark comedy gestures don't quite land with the formal control needed to justify the tonal split.
The masterstroke is casting the neighbour as pure narrative catalyst rather than character; by refusing to psychologize him, Lino forces every ounce of the film's weight onto Andres's envy and inertia, and it's that structural decision—that withholding—that makes the 15 minutes feel considered instead of overstuffed.