Ceviche
2022 · 15m · España
Directed by Pepe Lillo
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, melancholic
Roberto, Luisa's husband, has suffered a severe cerebral stroke; Luisa, who takes care of him, feels alone; while she washes him someone rings the bell, it turns out to be a supposed vacuum cleaner saleswoman who had arranged with Roberto to explain the operation of said vacuum cleaner.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A vacuum cleaner salesman showing up mid-crisis is exactly the kind of tonal grenade most directors would botch, but Lillo lets the absurdity breathe without winking—it's subversive because it refuses to comment on its own weirdness.
The film positions itself shrewdly within a lineage of Buñuelian domestic disruption and contemporary Scandinavian noir, where the intrusion of the mundane becomes a formal device for examining isolation and care.
That doorbell ring—the decision to let a total stranger's arrival become the film's emotional turning point rather than resolve anything—transforms what could've been maudlin into something almost unbearably precise about how we cope.