Cuestión de suerte
2017 · 18m · España
Directed by Axier González
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic
Pablo, an unambitious street sweeper, finds a wallet containing a lottery ticket. The windfall tests whether money corrupts or simply unmasks the people around him.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The lottery-ticket premise is almost too on-the-nose—money as moral litmus test, the everyman suddenly empowered—but González subverts it by letting the satire breathe without punching, which is exactly the kind of restraint that makes subversion actually sting.
A formally assured chamber piece that traces its lineage through Buñuel and contemporary Spanish cinema's fascination with class and accident; the editing rhythm between Pablo's before and after states demonstrates real compositional thinking.
González finds the film in a single recurring choice—how the camera holds on Pablo's face in the moments after discovery, letting us watch him practice different versions of himself before he's even spent a single euro, which does the entire character work that a lesser film would've dumped into dialogue.