La gotera
1996 · 11m · España
Directed by Grojo, Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo
Genres: comedy, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
A man rests at home after a hard day's work when a small leak in his living room interrupts his rest, through which a peculiar surprise will fall.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man's evening destroyed by a leak sounds like the setup for a domestic realist bore, but Grojo and Sánchez-Cabezudo twist it into something genuinely weird—the kind of premise that sounds stupid until you watch it and realize they've weaponized the mundane against your expectations.
There's a lineage of Spanish surrealist comedy here, formally precise in its escalation from everyday irritation to absurdist rupture, executed with the kind of compositional control that rewards close viewing on second pass.
The film hangs entirely on the choice to play the protagonist's mounting frustration as deadpan rather than cartoonish—a single performance temperature that makes the surreal intrusion land with weight instead of whimsy.