Gazpacho
2017 · 5m · España
Directed by Borja Antona Gómez
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Julio cooks while his friend Vicente tells him his secret ingredient for a good cold soup. Their conversation in the kitchen unfolds around that recipe.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A five-minute film about soup recipes shouldn't be this unsettling—the fact that it is means Gómez has figured out something most directors miss: the grotesque lives in the domestic, and Vicente's "secret ingredient" confession is the kind of premise that makes you squirm because you're not sure if you're watching comedy or a threat.
Antona Gómez situates this squarely in a lineage of kitchen-sink realism interrogated by absurdist form—the measured pacing and compositional restraint allow the dialogue to do the discomfort work, a formal choice that recalls Haneke's understanding of how mundanity can turn vertiginous.
The entire short hinges on the decision to keep the camera steady and let the conversation breathe rather than cut away from discomfort; that commitment to letting awkward silences and offhand remarks land without editorial rescue is what transforms casual banter into something genuinely unnerving.