El juego
2017 · 3m · España
Directed by Francisco Miranda
Tones: darkly comic, tender
On an ordinary autumn Sunday afternoon, Julio and Pepa, a mature couple, are bored out of their minds — he channel-surfing, she leafing through a magazine — until Julio approaches her affectionately with a great idea to fight the tedium, and their exchange of questions and answers suggests something quite different from his real intentions.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The bait-and-switch premise is solid—lures you in on domestic ennui, then pivots to something genuinely unsettling—but it's almost too tidy, too aware of its own gotcha. Feels like it's winking at you instead of letting the darkness breathe.
A economical chamber piece with real lineage to Buñuel's comedies of manners; the tension between performance and revelation recalls that tradition of Spanish cinema that finds menace in the quotidian. Structurally assured in how it withholds.
The genius move here is the decision to play the entire setup in deadpan domestic realism—no winks, no score cues—so when the true nature of Julio's 'game' lands, it hits precisely because the film refused to signal anything was amiss. That restraint in a three-minute runtime is everything.