Los amigos están
2016 · 4m · España
Directed by Polo Menárguez
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
With black humor, brief encounters show what happens when you run into an acquaintance in an awkward situation and how people's attitudes change in public.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most scouts would call this a simple observational comedy about social awkwardness, but Menárguez is actually weaponizing the format itself—each encounter dismantles a different social lie we tell ourselves in public, and the absurdist escalation suggests he's made a film that gets meaner and funnier the more you think about it.
The formal restraint here is sharp: four minutes of vignettes that could collapse into sketch-comedy chaos instead cohere through a precise editorial rhythm and a tonal consistency that recalls the tradition of Buñuel's cruelty—uncomfortable, yes, but architecturally considered.
The thing that locks this in place is the casting choice—watching nonprofessional actors navigate the gap between what they want to project and what their faces actually betray in these encounters creates an authenticity that a slicker performer couldn't touch, and that tension does all the heavy lifting.