La puja
2026 · 18m · España
Directed by Nacho Varela
Genres: dark comedy, satire, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, surreal
Between dystopia and reality, the auction begins: an absurd, everyday portrait of a process whose greatest success is the acquisition of a commodity that everyone covets.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Varela takes the auction—capitalism's most bloodless ritual—and makes it genuinely *weird*, collapsing dystopia and the checkout line into one absurd ceremony where everyone's desperate for the same nothing. It's the kind of film that makes you uncomfortable because you can't decide if you're watching satire or documentary.
La puja situates itself in a lineage of Buñuelian absurdism and Kafkaesque institutional critique, with formal precision in its editing rhythm that transforms the mundane bidding process into something ceremonially grotesque. The restraint of the direction—letting the premise do the work rather than visual flourish—marks a maturity in satirical craft.
The film hinges entirely on the decision to play the auction deadpan, never winking at the audience or over-scoring the absurdity; that tonal restraint, held across 18 minutes, is what makes the surrealism land as horror rather than gimmick.