El Chófer
2023 · 12m · España
Directed by Candela Buttigliero, Kike Maíllo
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
When a tragic event marks his life forever, Rodolfo, chauffeur to an upper-class family, begins to slip away with the car to offer his services as a private driver. This work hides a peculiar objective: revenge.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A revenge thriller dressed up in class-conscious drag—fine, but it's playing the game everyone expects, and the film knows it. The setup has teeth, sure, but the execution feels dutiful rather than genuinely subversive.
Buttigliero and Maíllo construct a formally precise moral architecture here, where every scene of quotidian driving becomes a controlled space for psychological deterioration; the restraint of the filmmaking—its refusal to sensationalize the vengeance—marks it as work aware of its debt to European thriller tradition.
The genius move is making the car itself the confessional: those silences between passenger exchanges, the way Rodolfo's hands grip the wheel tighter with each fare—it's a micro-budget decision about negative space and gesture that does all the psychological work a bloated revenge plot would need dialogue to explain.