N.N
2013 · 22m · Chile
Directed by Brian Luco
Genres: drama, fantasy, thriller
Tones: absurdist, dark, surreal
Executive Benjamín Roeschmann arrives at work one morning and finds that no colleague recognises him, as if he had vanished from every mind, and he must face a day that will change his life without any way to prove he exists.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
N.N flips the existential-dread formula on its head by making the protagonist's erasure not metaphorical but literal—a corporate horror-absurdist premise that most scouts would dismiss as gimmicky, but Luco executes with the kind of deadpan commitment that makes you believe in the surreal logic. It's perverse, it shouldn't work, and it absolutely does.
The film draws from a lineage of Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare and European New Wave sensibility, executing its conceit with measured control—the mise-en-scène and editing choices maintain formal discipline even as the scenario spirals, which is precisely what elevates it beyond novelty into something structurally considered.
The masterstroke here is committing entirely to the protagonist's point-of-view: every interaction, every proof of existence denied, is filtered through his growing panic without a single expository beat—that tonal restraint and the decision to let absence do the heavy lifting is what transforms a high-concept premise into something genuinely unsettling on a modest scale.