Gracias por Quererme
2014 · 15m · España
Directed by Nestor D’Argentis
Genres: dark comedy, drama, romance
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
Diego lives a lonely life, with a lack of social skills and a body odour problem that works as a barrier between him and the world; when Susana, an attractive young woman, moves into the flat opposite, Diego falls madly in love with her, a love so desperate and visceral that his life will have no meaning if he cannot reach her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A loser obsessed with an unattainable woman sounds like rom-com pablum, but D'Argentis leans into the visceral *wrongness* of Diego's desire—treating his desperation not as quirk but as a kind of beautiful, suffocating pathology that most films wouldn't dare play straight.
The film sits confidently in a lineage of European character studies that treat romantic longing as psychological terrain; the restraint in its formal choices—understated mise-en-scène, measured pacing—lets the absurdist undertow do the real work.
The genius move is committing entirely to Diego's point-of-view while never letting us off the hook for it—there's a specificity in how the sound design isolates his body (that odour becomes almost a sonic presence) that transforms what could've been maudlin into something genuinely unsettling and alive.