Pajero
2016 · 8m · España
Directed by Aitor González Iturbe
Tones: absurdist, contemplative
Juan has a problem, or so he thinks; in reality he is about to discover he has several, in a story where something so everyday gave rise to so much mental noise.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A guy spirals over a Mitsubishi Pajero and discovers his entire life is the real problem—it's the kind of deadpan escalation that shouldn't work on an 8-minute budget, but González Iturbe makes the mundane genuinely vertiginous, which means everyone else was sleeping on it.
The film's formal restraint—its refusal to punctuate the protagonist's unraveling with conventional dramatic beats—places it in conversation with a certain lineage of European comedy-dramas that prize observation over catharsis, though the specificity of the object (a car as nexus for existential crisis) keeps it from feeling inherited.
What lands here is the decision to let the camera stay almost motionless while the character's internal chaos blooms around a stationary Pajero—that stillness against mounting absurdity does the entire film's emotional work, and it's a choice so economical it feels like the only way this story could exist.