Padam…
2006 · 13m · España
Directed by José Manuel Carrasco
Genres: dark comedy, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, tense
Pilar does not want to be alone and turns to a marriage agency, which gets her a blind date; what Pilar does not know is that this person has other plans that have nothing to do with hers.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A marriage-agency setup that pivots into something genuinely sinister—the kind of bait-and-switch that makes you retroactively recalculate every frame before it. Carrasco does what most shorts are too precious to attempt: he lets the premise betray you.
The film's architecture echoes a classical thriller structure, but its tonal restraint and commitment to misdirection as form place it in dialogue with Bunuel and the European grotesque tradition of subverting bourgeois courtship rituals.
The real gambit here is the sound design and what isn't shown—Carrasco constructs mounting dread almost entirely through what we *don't* see, letting the blind date's silence do the heavy lifting that a bigger budget would waste on exposition.