Fernando
2019 · 3m · España
Directed by José Luis Sáez Fernández
Genres: comedy
A woman tells her neighbor that her husband left her to buy tobacco; as the neighbor rails against the absent husband, he walks back in with the tobacco.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Three minutes of pure narrative sabotage—the husband's return obliterates the entire setup the neighbor (and the audience) has been building a resentment around, which is exactly the kind of structural insolence that makes consensus critics squirm and actually works.
A cleanly constructed reversal that echoes the tradition of comedic timing in European short cinema, though the premise itself feels more like a joke than a work of considered filmic form.
The timing of that walk-in—the exact beat where the neighbor's momentum crests and the door opens—is the only real filmmaking choice here, and it's the difference between a sketch and something that sticks.