En el hoyo
2006 · 24m · España
Directed by David Martín de los Santos
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, dark
Lucía is desperate and has decided to take her own life; in her attempt, a motorcyclist is thrown through the air and falls down an embankment, alone and unable to move, watching, still stunned, another motorcyclist fall down the same embankment — a Moroccan who does not speak Spanish.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A suicide attempt that becomes a slapstick collision of strangers tumbling into absurdist limbo—*En el hoyo* takes the premise everyone would reject and mines it for something genuinely unsettling and hilarious, which is exactly the kind of "wait, WHAT?" inversion that nobody else would greenlight.
The film's restraint in framing—those still shots of immobilized bodies witnessing further catastrophe—situates itself in a lineage of Buñuelian dark comedy and European existential drama, with the formal precision to let silence and stasis do the philosophical work.
The decision to keep the camera mostly static while bodies accumulate at the bottom of an embankment, watching helplessly as more fall, transforms what could be sentimental into something icily observational—that compositional choice, and the language barrier between the trapped characters, does all the storytelling.