Lie Detector (Detector de mentiras)
2011 · 3m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Paul Emerson
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Dane has only one chance to make a wonderful first impression at a job interview, and fortunately a lie detector is present in the room.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
The premise is perfectly backwards—a lie detector that's *supposed* to help you succeed becomes the instrument of your destruction, which is exactly the kind of subversive inversion that makes satire actually sting instead of just wink. Most people would play this as a gag; Emerson weaponizes it.
A cleanly constructed absurdist piece that sits comfortably in the lineage of Kafkaesque comedy-of-humiliation, with the kind of formal restraint—three minutes, one room, one ironic prop—that recalls the precision of mid-century experimental shorts.
The single choice here is the unwavering commitment to the lie detector as *literal*—no magic, no metaphor, just an interviewer who trusts the machine more than the candidate's words, and that brutal literalism is what transforms a one-liner into something that actually lands.