Las Muelas del Cuco
2016 · 17m · España
Directed by Veru Rodríguez
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
Two mafiosos receive a simple assignment: deliver merchandise and return with the money for their boss. After an argument between them, they gamble it all away in a casino; with their lives on the line, they decide to rob a jewellery shop to recover it, not knowing they are about to rob their own boss's mother.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A crime caper that actually *means* something by refusing to mean anything—two guys spiral into a Kafkaesque disaster because they argued, gambled, and accidentally robbed the wrong person, and Rodriguez plays it completely straight instead of winking at the audience. This is genre sabotage masquerading as a heist, and it's exactly the kind of premise that makes people mad at film festivals for programming it.
Rodriguez channels the tonal precision of Coen Brothers-adjacent crime cinema while maintaining its own regional specificity; the escalation from petty argument to jewel-store catastrophe traces a classical tragic arc with contemporary dark-comic sensibility, though the film risks collapsing its own formal ambitions under the weight of its premise.
The entire film hinges on the decision to play the casino scene as a continuous, almost unbearable sequence of losses—no cutaways, no relief—which transmutes what could be a gag into genuine dread, and suddenly the robbery that follows feels inevitable rather than absurd.