Lo primero y principal
2021 · 11m · España
Directed by Carlos Robles
Genres: drama, mystery, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, surreal, tense
Two strangers meet at a job interview where nothing is as it seems, and the encounter unexpectedly links their fates.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A job interview as a portal to psychological vertigo—Robles refuses the obvious thriller beats and instead lets surrealism and dark comedy corrode the whole premise from within, which is exactly the kind of "wait, what just happened?" that makes genre feel alive again.
The film's restraint in staging and its deliberate withholding of exposition show a real understanding of how tension accumulates through formal precision; there's a lineage here to Buñuel's absurdist logic, even if the execution doesn't quite reach that rigor.
The casting choice to play both characters with a kind of deadpan mundanity against the surreal scenario is what sells it—that specific tonal commitment transforms what could've been gimmicky into something genuinely unsettling on a shoestring.