De Mesmer, con amor ó Té para dos
2002 · 9m · México
Directed by Alejandro Lubezki, Salvador Aguirre
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: melancholic, provocative, surreal
Alberto resorts to disturbing and extravagant practices to break through his loneliness and fulfill his desires. His methods grow more extreme as his isolation deepens.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2002 micro-budget film about descent into ritualistic obsession masquerading as romance—this is exactly the kind of unsettling, tonally slippery premise that makes everyone else uncomfortable and me lean forward. Lubezki and Aguirre refuse the obvious moral framework; instead they let Alberto's escalation sit in that queasy space between dark comedy and genuine pathos, which is where all the best subversions live.
The formal restraint here—how the surreal elements accumulate without ever tipping into explicit grotesquerie—suggests filmmakers alert to a lineage of Spanish cinema's confrontation with desire and madness. The 9-minute structure functions almost as a tonal étude, each escalation measured and precisely calibrated against the last.
What makes this work is the decision to keep Alberto's face *present* even as his methods grow more extreme; a lesser film cuts away, but staying with him creates a kind of complicity that costs nothing and changes everything. That commitment to the performer's endurance, shot on what looks like next to nothing, is what elevates this from concept into something genuinely unsettling.