Distrito 26
2025 · 7m · Mexico
Directed by Sergio Russo, Alfredo Russo, Cesar Monreal
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A mockumentary comedy about a security guard indirectly responsible for a string of robberies in a residential tower.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A security guard as the unwitting architect of his own building's undoing—it's the kind of backwards logic that makes you wince and laugh simultaneously, and most scouts would've passed because it's too weird to market as straightforward crime comedy. This is exactly the film that shouldn't work but does, which is why it works.
The mockumentary form here feels like a deliberate conversation with the Safdie brothers and Argentine crime comedies, though the execution leans toward absurdist rather than procedural—competent framing, but the tonal register doesn't quite stabilize into the kind of formally rigorous satire that lingers.
The decision to make the guard complicit through negligence rather than malice is the spine that holds everything together, and you can feel it in the performance—that specific quality of dawning realization played as baffled indignation rather than moral reckoning.