Cosas Feas
2010 · 34m · Mexico
Directed by Isaac Ezban
Genres: dark comedy, drama, horror
Tones: absurdist, dark, surreal
The film follows Kriko Krakinsky, a lonely 11-year-old boy living in a strange and bizarre family of immigrants who share disturbing and mysterious behaviors around sexual issues.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Ezban takes the coming-of-age wound and grafts it onto a family portrait so unsettling and weird that it stops being trauma-drama and becomes something genuinely disorienting—the kind of film that makes you uncomfortable in ways you can't quite name, which is exactly when cinema matters.
A formally controlled descent into family pathology that owes debts to both the European art-house tradition and the grotesque-realist lineage; Ezban's compositional precision keeps the surrealism tethered rather than let it spin into mere provocation.
The film's masterstroke is treating the family's disturbing rituals with the same flat, observational camera as breakfast—no score swells, no cutaways—which forces the viewer into complicity rather than judgment, and that tonal choice reframes the entire moral weight of watching.