Oxitocina
2011 · 14m · España
Directed by José Luis Santos
Genres: crime, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
On New Year's Eve 2010, with three hours until midnight, young couple Jacobo and Nuria review their plan on a bench facing their target, in their last chance at a scheme as absurd as the world around them.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A New Year's Eve heist that treats the countdown like a ticking-clock absurdist pressure cooker—the real subversion is that we never quite know if Jacobo and Nuria are brilliant or delusional, and the film refuses to tip its hand either way, which is exactly the kind of tonal stubbornness I live for.
Santos constructs a formally precise chamber piece that recalls the constraint-based rigor of early Erice or Saura, where every bench angle and clock-check compounds psychological tension; the restraint is the form, and that kind of measured escalation is increasingly rare.
The entire film hinges on the decision to keep the 'scheme' vague and let Jacobo and Nuria's body language—a glance, a pause, a recalibration—do the storytelling work, turning what could've been exposition into pure behavioral texture on a fourteen-minute budget.