Operación preferente
2015 · 20m · España
Directed by Carles Velat, Roger Comella
Genres: crime, dark comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
Four masked men kidnap a small-town bank manager and demand 90,000 euros from his own pocket; when their van breaks down halfway, the captors unmask and reveal themselves as victims fighting to recover the money he stole from them.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A kidnapping that reveals itself as its own inversion—the criminals unmask as victims and the victim as villain—is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus critics squirm, and Velat and Comella lean hard into that discomfort without winking at the audience.
The film's structural reversal sits within a lineage of Spanish noir and crime-comedy traditions, though the execution here trades formal precision for a more scattershot tonal mixture that keeps it from achieving the disciplined control that would elevate it to the first rank.
The masterstroke is the broken-down van as turning point—a mundane mechanical failure that forces the narrative inversion and punctures the crime thriller's momentum, and that single decision to ground the twist in physical reality rather than contrivance is what makes this work on a shoestring.