Polvotron 500
2020 · 11m · España
Directed by Silvia Conesa
Genres: dark comedy, drama, sci-fi
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, surreal
Year 2065. Charly is a grey man in a hopeless world dominated by large corporations, where everything has a price, even resting without being besieged by advertising. Charly usually sleeps in an old holographic booth, where he arranges for nobody to bother him; one night he mistakenly activates the resident sexual hologram, 'Niky', unaware it is a new model with improved quantum intelligence.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A corporate dystopia that doesn't just reject the grimdark sci-fi consensus—it lets a sex bot achieve sentience and become the story's moral center, which is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus critics squirm and proves them wrong. Conesa swings for the subversive fences and lands it.
Formally situated in the lineage of speculative noir and cyberpunk cinema, yet the film's restraint—its refusal to overwhelm the 11 minutes with visual spectacle—demonstrates a considered understanding of how tone and negative space function in the tradition. The melancholy register feels earned rather than grafted.
The decision to play Niky's emerging consciousness with an almost deadpan tenderness, rather than as menace or joke, is the hinge that makes a familiar premise breathe; on a small budget, that singular tonal choice transforms the entire moral weight of the piece.