Nada S.A.
2014 · 16m · España
Directed by Albert Pintó, Caye Casas
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
Carlos has been unemployed for years, and is desperate after failing in all the job interviews he presents himself to; one day Carlos sees an advertisement of a company called NADA S.A. that looks for a candidate who wants to charge for doing nothing; Carlos gets the job, but that day will change his life.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A company that pays you to do nothing is the kind of premise that makes you laugh and then immediately uncomfortable—which is exactly where satire lives when it's not phoning it in. Pintó and Casas take the absurdist economics of late capitalism and make it literal, which means they're either geniuses or mad, and either way I'm here for it.
The film's restraint in its formal structure—the clean staging of interview failures followed by the anti-climax of absolute vacancy—draws a line back to Buñuel's absurdist tradition while maintaining its own tonal precision. It's a measured piece of social critique dressed as comedy, which is harder to pull off than it looks.
The decision to play it straight when Carlos actually gets the job—no winking, no mugging, just the creeping dread of consequence in a room designed for nothing—is what sells the whole thing; that tonal pivot from desperation to emptiness does the work a bigger budget would waste on elaboration.