Elhijo 10
2012 · 21m · España
Directed by Óscar Lorca, Chema Argente
Genres: dark comedy, satire, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
Ana and Manuel have decided to buy a son in Natural Factory, one of many companies that sell children à la carte. What they did not realise was that the price of such a choice would be so high.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise so brazenly wrong—commodified human reproduction as casual commerce—that it should fail, but instead it swings between horror and farce with the confidence of someone who knows exactly how uncomfortable they're making you. This is the kind of film that makes you defend something indefensible just to argue about it.
The film's restraint in tone—refusing easy sentimentality or moral hand-wringing—positions it in a lineage of European satirical sci-fi that trusts formal clarity to do the philosophical work; the deadpan performances and sparse design language are precisely calibrated to let the premise's obscenity speak for itself.
The masterstroke is the tonal discipline: by playing the transaction of buying a child with the same bureaucratic boredom as ordering furniture, the directors extract the full grotesque comedy without a wink, which transforms what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely unsettling and alive.