Encuentros en la tercera edad/Close Encounters of the Old Age
2015 · 7m · España
Directed by Víctor Ruiz Junquera
Genres: dark comedy, mystery, thriller
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, dark
Aurelio is an old man enjoying his old age with his friends, but one day one of them, Matías, disappears and the rest keep vanishing, so Aurelio tries to discover the truth behind the mystery.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A sci-fi abduction premise weaponized as a deadpan meditation on mortality and vanishing friendships—it's the kind of subversive genre inversion that makes you laugh and then sit with something genuinely unsettling, which is exactly the space where most scouts won't follow.
Junquera orchestrates a tonal tightrope between Twilight Zone nostalgia and contemporary absurdism with formal precision, situating the mystery-thriller within a lineage of philosophical genre cinema that rewards close viewing and restless interpretation.
The film's entire moral weight hinges on a single recurring image—the empty chair at the table—which transforms from setup to devastating thesis statement through nothing but compositional consistency and the actors' learned restraint.