Éramos pocos
2005 · 16m · España
Directed by Borja Cobeaga
Tones: darkly comic, humorous
A father and son are incapable of doing the household chores; when the mother abandons them for how disastrous they are, they decide to get grandmother out of the nursing home.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise *looks* like comfort-food family comedy, but Cobeaga's actually doing something meaner — the grandmother rescue is just a cover for a story about male incompetence that doesn't let anyone off the hook, not even the audience's sympathy.
A cleanly constructed domestic comedy in the lineage of Ealing and Spanish television humor, where the three-act structure (incompetence, abandonment, solution) carries the weight of genuine family fracture beneath the comic surface.
The entire film hinges on that single decision to make the solution *worse* than the problem — bringing grandmother in doesn't fix anything, it just redistributes the chaos — and that one tonal choice transforms what could've been sitcom into something genuinely unsettling.