Matar al Presidente
2016 · 15m · España
Directed by Pedro Pacheco Arlandi
Genres: crime, drama, thriller
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
Ramón, a builder who lost his job and his family in the construction crisis, undertakes a laborious plan to end his desperation and that of so many others.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The premise reads like a revenge thriller, but Pacheco Arlandi refuses the catharsis—instead he builds unbearable slowness around a man so hollowed by crisis that the act becomes almost bureaucratic. It's anti-climactic in the best way, which means most people will hate it.
A formal descendant of European social realism, particularly the Spanish tradition of depicting economic collapse through individual bodies; the film's restraint and compositional discipline recall early Erice, though its contemporary desperation is distinctly its own.
The choice to shoot the preparation—the obsessive, quotidian labor of the plan itself—rather than the event creates a kind of numbed inevitability that no dramatic reveal could match; it's a structural decision that transforms what could be pulp into something genuinely haunting.