Novelera
2020 · 17m · España
Directed by Willy Suárez
Genres: adventure, comedy, mystery
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
Nona, the neighbourhood gossip, witnesses an alleged kidnapping in the window opposite. She decides to save them, but with her reputation for making up stories nobody believes her — except the water delivery man on his first day of work. Both will be caught up in a false rescue that brings them a strange adventure.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A gossip-and-water-delivery-guy buddy caper built on mistaken identity and false rescue sounds like it should be crowd-pleasing dreck, but Suárez leans into the absurdist wrongness of it—nobody's heroic, nobody's even right, and the film doesn't apologize for that.
There's a lineage here from screwball comedy through Ealing's mishap narratives, and Novelera respects that tradition while maintaining its own tonal control—the whimsy and darkness sit in genuine tension rather than confusion.
The entire film hinges on the decision to cast a first-day water delivery man as the believer: that single choice—untested, eager to prove himself—makes the false rescue feel earned rather than convenient, and it's what transforms a premise into something real.