El misterio del pez
2008 · 10m · España
Directed by Giovanni Maccelli
Tones: absurdist, contemplative
Since his retirement, an old man goes fishing every day at the reservoir, fishing to pass the time rather than to catch fish; when he catches a fish with two little spots under its fin and returns it, the same fish bites again the next day, and the next, until weeks later he has exhausted all his theories.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A retired man fishing the same spot until a two-spotted fish decides to haunt him for weeks—this is what passes for mystery now? Brilliant. It's a premise so deliberately thin it circles back to genuinely unsettling, which means most people will hate it and I'll be vindicated.
Maccelli's restraint here echoes the structural patience of Bresson and early Koreeda—a film that trusts duration and repetition as its formal language, letting absurdism emerge through meticulous observation rather than announcement.
The genius move is returning the fish every single time: that one decision transforms a fishing vignette into something that compounds, that makes you feel the man's obsession calcifying week by week, all for under $50k and a reservoir.