Con Paquito era mejor
2018 · 5m · España
Directed by Adán Pichardo
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Carmelo, convinced that things were better with Paquito, moves against his will into his daughter and son-in-law's house, where his frustrated reflections provoke a crazy, unsustainable situation.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A widower's nostalgia becomes a family pressure cooker—solid premise, but the execution plays it straight when it could've gone genuinely weird with the Paquito obsession; the film knows it's darkly comic but doesn't commit to the subversion.
Pichardo demonstrates formal control in threading sentiment with comedy, and the domestic claustrophobia recalls a lineage of intimate Spanish-language family dramas, though the tonal balance—contemplative one moment, farcical the next—feels slightly uncertain in its tradition.
What elevates this is the sound design choice of Carmelo's internal monologue becoming increasingly unreliable against the family's reactions—that single decision turns a familiar generational conflict into something that breathes with real psychological texture on a microbudget.