Fuera de tono
2019 · 15m · España
Directed by Raúl Guíu Laplaza
Genres: comedy, musical, romance
Tones: darkly comic, tender, whimsical
Esther, a diligent and willing ticket seller at the amusement park, is thrilled when the director promotes her to Head of Operations, until she learns that her first action in the new post must be to fire Lucas, the disastrous colleague she is in love with.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A musical rom-com about office politics at a theme park sounds like exactly the kind of twee premise everyone else would greenlight—but Laplaza somehow makes the contradiction *sing*, turning corporate cruelty and romantic paralysis into something genuinely unsettling under the whimsy.
The film's lineage is legible: it draws from a tradition of European musical comedy that prizes emotional specificity over spectacle, and the restraint in how it deploys its musical numbers—timing them to moments of psychological rupture—shows formal control that rewards close viewing.
What makes this work is the sound design decision to let the theme park ambience (mechanical rides, distant calliope) bleed through every intimate scene, so Esther's internal conflict never gets a moment of quiet—it's a small technical choice that transforms the whole emotional register.