Cuentos
2017 · 13m · España
Directed by Edu Escudero
Genres: dark comedy, drama, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, theatrical
David loves telling stories to Natalia, and she loves listening — except today, when she wants to tell him one for the first time, unaware of the madman hidden in the bathroom, the waitress in love, and destiny's plan for it to be her last story.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A love story that casually demolishes itself mid-sentence—the premise does the heavy lifting, but what gets you is how *casually* Escudero lets the madman, the waitress, and fate collide in 13 minutes without begging you to pick a side. Genre-slippery in exactly the way that makes other scouts nervous.
Escudero's theatrical tone and nested-narrative structure recall a lineage of darkly comic shorts concerned with storytelling as destiny, though the multiplicity of perspectives threatens to undermine the formal control that would elevate this beyond a clever premise.
The real move here is the tonal permission Escudero gives himself to let each character's perspective—David's tenderness, Natalia's hunger to speak, the waitress's longing—coexist without resolution; that refusal to collapse the frame into a single emotional truth is what transforms a high-concept premise into something that actually breathes.