El encendedor cuántico
2015 · 5m · España
Directed by Pau Escribano
Genres: drama, mystery, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tense
A couple is at a bar; when he returns from the bathroom he tells her he is not him, that he comes from the future, and asks her to do something she never thought she would have to do.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A guy walks out of a bathroom and demolishes the entire scaffolding of intimate reality in five minutes—no explanation, no wink, just a quantum bomb dropped on date-night conversation. This is the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable in the best way, and Escribano has the audacity to just let it sit there, unresolved.
Escribano's economy of form recalls the taut philosophical sci-fi lineage of Tarkovsky's shorts and Kiarostami's constraint-based work, where metaphysical rupture emerges from compositional discipline rather than spectacle. The film's refusal to resolve itself formally mirrors its thematic obsession with identity fracture.
The decision to play the entire reveal in a single, unbroken conversation—no cutaways, no visual trickery—transforms what could've been gimmicky into something genuinely vertiginous; Escribano trusts the performance and the proximity to do the ontological work.