ESCAPE CAR
2025 · 3m · España
Directed by Patricia Torres
Genres: adventure, comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Genna and Susana wake up gagged and disoriented inside an abandoned car in a wasteland outside Madrid, and what seems like the end of their lives becomes the start of an absurd adventure.
Picked by Felix
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A kidnapping that turns into a joyride—most filmmakers would play this straight or lean hard into trauma, but Torres flips the premise into something genuinely weird and anarchic. This is the kind of subversive left turn that makes you forget what genre you're watching, and that's exactly when cinema gets interesting.
Torres demonstrates formal control in how economically she establishes disorientation—the gagging, the wasteland framing—before pivoting into absurdist territory, a tonal negotiation that requires precise editing and pacing to avoid collapse. It's a small film aware of its debt to surrealist comedy traditions while carving its own space.
The decision to treat the crisis as genuinely absurd rather than salvageable—to let Genna and Susana's response become comedic rather than desperate—lives entirely in performance and Torres's willingness to trust silence and reaction over exposition in three minutes. That restraint is what transforms premise into character.