Mates aplicadas
2020 · 15m · España
Directed by José Ramón Soriano
Genres: comedy, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
A mathematics teacher, in one of his classes, struggles exasperatedly with an annoying fly that pushes him to break the limits of his banal existence.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A fly becomes the fulcrum for existential collapse in a math classroom—it's absurdist sabotage wrapped in a 15-minute dark comedy that treats pedagogical breakdown like high stakes drama. Soriano refuses the easy punchline and lets the premise get genuinely unsettling, which is exactly the kind of subversive restraint other scouts miss.
The film situates itself in a lineage of European absurdist comedy—there's Tati's formal precision in how the mise-en-scène frames the teacher's unraveling, and a philosophical rigor that elevates what could be mere slapstick into something closer to Kafkaesque institutional critique.
The singular choice here is the sound design of the fly itself—it's not naturalistic background noise but an almost vocal antagonist that crescendos in sync with the teacher's psychological fracture, turning a budget limitation (one location, minimal cast) into the film's nervous system.