Hongos
1999 · 21m · España
Directed by Ramón Salazar
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
Marisa, an aspiring actress from Málaga struggling in Madrid, auditions endlessly without success and dreams of finding the man of her dreams, but instead only develops vaginal thrush.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 1999 Madrid comedy that treats an actress's thrush as the punchline to her entire romantic and professional collapse—it's exactly the kind of premise that makes you wince and laugh at the same time, and most scouts would've passed because it *shouldn't* work, but Salazar knows it does.
Salazar positions this within a lineage of Spanish comedic cinema that refuses easy sentiment, balancing formal restraint against the grotesque specificity of his central metaphor; the tonal control here—darkly comic without slipping into cruelty—suggests a filmmaker aware of his tradition and how to trouble it.
The stroke that makes this work is the commitment to the absurdist literalism: every audition rejection, every romantic failure, every dream deferred funnels into this single biological humiliation, and Salazar never winks at the camera—that deadpan refusal to soften the premise is what transforms a crude joke into something genuinely strange and human.