La soledad del cormorán
2013 · 18m · España
Directed by Guillermo Chapa
Genres: dark comedy, drama, satire
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
Jesús, a human billboard trapped in a world where advertising fills daily routine, becomes an antihero caught inside the commercial game.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A human billboard as protagonist is the kind of premise that makes you laugh at how obvious it should've been — Chapa strips advertising down to its most literal absurdity and somehow makes the contradiction feel fresh, like he's found a trap door in satire that everyone else missed.
Chapa's work sits comfortably in the lineage of Buñuel and mid-period Erice, where formal precision and darkly comic restraint build a critique that doesn't announce itself; the editing rhythm and tonal control suggest a filmmaker thinking carefully about what satire demands structurally.
The single choice here is treating Jesús's human-billboard body as literally static while the world moves around him — it's a constraint that could've felt gimmicky, but the decision to play it deadpan and contemplative instead of broad transforms the whole film into something that earns its darkness through staging, not writing.