El cocodrilo Nilo
2010 · 18m · España
Directed by Javier Dampierre
Javier and Laura arrive at a hotel with their son Alvarito, and Javier wants only to leave the boy with the children's monitors so he can go upstairs with his wife, but Alvarito is afraid of the Nile crocodile.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A comedy about parental desire masquerading as kids' entertainment shouldn't work this cleanly, but Dampierre commits to the weird tonal friction—the crocodile anxiety becomes a Trojan horse for actual adult impatience, and it's refreshingly unsentimental about family.
The film sits comfortably in a European tradition of whimsical children's cinema (Vigo, Tati DNA), with a formally precise control of comedic timing and spatial geography that recalls how constraints generate elegance rather than compromise.
The entire film hinges on a single casting/performance choice—Alvarito's genuinely unsettling fear of a *stuffed* crocodile, played with such conviction that it becomes the emotional anchor—and that one decision transforms a domestic setup into something oddly poignant and precise.