Él y Ella
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Guillermo Pastor Cock
On a first date arranged through an app, a young man and woman seem made for each other, but their intrusive thoughts and prejudices keep trying to pull them apart.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The app-date rom-com is the safest territory imaginable, so Pastor Cock's decision to weaponize intrusive thoughts as comedy antagonists is genuinely perverse—it's like watching someone find the one lever that makes the machine malfunction beautifully.
A formally playful riff on the romantic comedy's central tension (desire vs. doubt), executed with the kind of tonal control that suggests Pastor Cock has studied how Rohmer and Godard weaponized conversation; the construction is tighter than its whimsy initially suggests.
The entire film hinges on whether those intrusive-thought interruptions land as visual gags or psychological truth, and Pastor Cock's choice to let them be *both* simultaneously—cacophonous, impossible to ignore, yet somehow charming—is the filmmaking decision that justifies the whole premise.