Country
2007 · 12m · España
Directed by Jesús Prieto
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tender
Noelia, a single woman, wakes in the middle of the night and surprises a man robbing her; far from attacking her, the thief starts a conversation with his victim, who begins to see her attacker as a future sentimental partner.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A burglar sweet-talks his way into his victim's heart mid-heist—it's a premise so backwards it shouldn't work, yet Prieto plays it straight enough that the absurdity becomes genuinely disarming. This is the kind of subversive romantic setup that makes every other meet-cute look cowardly.
Prieto channels the tonal sophistication of mid-2000s European arthouse cinema, where crime and tenderness coexist without kitsch; the film's restraint in handling its perverse premise sits firmly in a lineage of formally rigorous character studies that refuse easy sentiment.
The entire film pivots on a single directorial choice: letting the conversation breathe in real time rather than cutting around it, which transforms what could've been a gimmick into genuine intimacy and makes the economic constraint—two people, one room—feel like the whole point.