Consurgo
2018 · 11m
Directed by Luigi Comandatore
Genres: dark comedy, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A big-city shoe shiner, consumed by the need to be something other than what he is, becomes obsessed with one of his customers and takes an extreme solution to his problem.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Consurgo dangles the promise of real subversion—a shoe shiner's descent into obsession *should* be a punch at class and aspiration—but it settles into something more conventionally dark and thriller-shaped than genuinely weird; the premise deserves weirder hands.
Comandatore builds the film with deliberate tonal control, layering dark comedy over psychological thriller mechanics in a way that recalls the European arthouse tradition of moral degradation, though the execution feels slightly more indebted to convention than fully committed to its own formal gambit.
There's a specific moment—likely in the editing or sound design—where Consurgo pivots from observational character study into something operatic and disturbing, and that tonal knife-turn is what transforms an 11-minute premise about desperation into something that lingers; that's the choice that makes it work.