Parchís (v.o.)
2018 · 7m · España
Directed by Frankman Román
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, tense
Three friends meet one afternoon for a simple, harmless game of Parcheesi, but when everything depends on a dice roll, friendship ceases to exist.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A board game becomes a pressure cooker for human brutality—it's the kind of premise that sounds like a joke until you realize Román isn't winking at the camera, he's dead serious. Takes the most banal social ritual imaginable and weaponizes it, which is exactly the contrarian move everyone else is too timid to commit to.
The restraint here is deliberate and classical: a confined space, escalating stakes, the slow degradation of social contract through a formal game structure that echoes Buñuel's absurdist lineage. Román trusts the audience to feel the tension without flourish—that's the mark of a director aware of what comedy and drama can do when held in perfect tension.
What makes this work is the decision to play it completely straight; there's no wink, no meta-commentary, just three people and a dice game treated with the weight of a Greek tragedy. That tonal commitment—where a single die roll carries the weight of genuine psychological breakdown—is the choice that transforms a seven-minute short into something that sticks.