Brasil
2001 · 19m · España
Directed by F. Javier Gutiérrez
Genres: dark comedy, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
Otto, a sad assembly-line worker, discovers his wife Sarah's infidelity, and on the day before their separation begins a macabre, convoluted revenge.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A blue-collar guy plots revenge on his cheating wife and somehow lands in full surrealist fever dream—it's exactly the kind of premise that sounds generic until you realize Gutiérrez is playing it completely straight, collapsing kitchen-sink drama into something deliriously wrong, and nobody else would've even tried it.
Gutiérrez's command of tonal register is assured, moving from naturalistic domestic rupture into baroque psychological territory with the formal precision of someone conscious of the lineage from Buñuel through Erice—the editing sustains that unease beautifully.
The film's entire architecture hinges on the choice to let Otto's interior world bleed into the surface without winking at it; that decision to trust the surrealism as emotional logic rather than stylistic flourish is what elevates this from premise to vision on a nineteen-minute budget.