Life Vest Under your Seat (volamos hacia Miami)
2012 · 18m · España
Directed by María Giráldez, Miguel Provencio
Tones: darkly comic, humorous
The tranquillity of a Madrid–Miami flight is disrupted by Mauro, an arrogant passenger who decides to skip the strict rules of conduct and safety that govern any aeroplane.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A passenger who refuses to follow airline safety protocol sounds like a setup for preachy messaging, but instead these directors let the absurdity spiral into something genuinely unsettling—the kind of dark comedy that doesn't wink at the audience, it just lets the cabin pressure do the work.
The film's constraint—confined space, rigid institutional rules, a single disruptor—recalls a lineage of chamber comedies and Bunuel-adjacent social provocations, though the execution feels slight; the formal rigor wavers between satirical precision and sketch-comedy indulgence.
The real lever here is the decision to play Mauro's transgression straight rather than cartoonish, treating his rule-breaking with the mundane inevitability of a real flight delay—that tonal anchor makes the escalating chaos feel earned rather than manufactured on a modest budget.