Maniac
2013 · 13m · France
Directed by Bo Mirosseni
Genres: dark comedy, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
A man books an off-season holiday with friends at a grand hotel on the Spanish coast, only to discover he is its sole guest when his friends cancel. Boredom and extreme solitude slowly drive the lone vacationer to madness.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A vacation thriller that inverts the genre entirely—no killer, no plot twist, just a man's mind collapsing under the weight of nothing. Mirosseni commits to the absurdist premise so completely that boredom becomes genuine terror, which is exactly the kind of premise that makes other scouts nervous and makes me pay attention.
The film situates itself deliberately in the lineage of psychological isolation narratives—Polanski's *Repulsion* proximity is felt—but Mirosseni's restraint in the formal language (holding the hotel's grand emptiness as character) demonstrates real curatorial control over tone and space.
What elevates this beyond a one-joke premise is the decision to play the protagonist's unraveling with almost no dialogue or score, letting the ambient sound design and the actor's physical choices carry the weight—a high-wire choice on a minimal budget that makes the loneliness feel unbearably specific.
Reviews
L'ennui qui envahit peu à peu le personnage lui fait perdre la raison. Ne sachant plus comment tromper son ennui de façon civilisée, il agit contre toute bienséance.