Mirindas asesinas
1991 · 12m · España
Directed by Álex de la Iglesia
Genres: comedy, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A man walks into a bar with only one customer and orders a cold Mirinda soft drink; the trouble begins when the waiter tries to charge him for it.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 12-minute argument about a Mirinda that becomes a descent into something genuinely unhinged — de la Iglesia takes the most banal consumer transaction and weaponizes it into absurdist horror that makes you question why you're laughing. Most scouts would see a gimmick; I see a filmmaker who knows that the real grotesque lives in the mundane.
De la Iglesia's early command of escalation and visual deadpan situates this squarely in the Spanish grotesque tradition, with precise editing rhythms that recall both Buñuel's comic cruelty and the formal rigor of contemporary European absurdism. The restraint of the premise paired with the baroque execution marks a filmmaker already thinking in frames.
The genius here is the waiter's face — or rather, the decision to keep it almost completely still while everything around him spirals into anarchy, letting the other actor's desperation do all the work. That single choice of reactive restraint against escalating chaos is what transforms a one-joke premise into something that actually breathes.