El iluso
2014 · 26m · España
Directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Genres: comedy
Max wakes up without realizing that the day before the hour had changed; a series of events are precipitated throughout the day because of having left home an hour late.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A daylight-saving-time premise sounds like a greeting card, but Sorogoyen actually lets it detonate—the absurdism isn't the joke, it's the domino chain of small betrayals and miscommunications that spiral from one missed hour, which is genuinely unsettling.
Sorogoyen's economy of narrative here sits in conversation with Tati and the European absurdist tradition—the formal constraint (one hour's displacement) functions like a perfect three-act structure disguised as a shrug, and the editing maintains that tonal tightrope throughout.
The decision to play the entire escalation in real time, letting the audience gradually realize the hour shift alongside Max, transforms what could've been a sitcom into something with genuine mounting dread—one structural choice that makes the whole mechanism sing.