La cosa está muy mal
2014 · 11m · España
Directed by Francisco J. Pena
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic
Fran goes out looking for work in his best jacket, intending to get a good post wherever it may be, but never manages to find his place in the market. The situation becomes unsustainable when Fer, his friend and flatmate, gives him an ultimatum: pay up or out on the street.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a straight economic-anxiety drama dressed up with dark comedy tonal shifts, which is exactly the kind of thing everyone else will greenlight—competent, safe, and ultimately forgettable.
The melancholic restraint and refusal of redemptive arc place it in a lineage of Spanish neo-realism, though the tonal balancing between comedy and desperation occasionally undercuts rather than deepens the formal argument.
Peña's decision to keep Fran's job-search a series of mundane, nearly-wordless encounters—letting humiliation breathe in silences rather than confrontation—is what transforms a premise about precarity into something that actually lands in the chest.