Rob Roy
2025 · 16m
Directed by Enrique Mendoza
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: darkly comic, tense, theatrical
A young programmer who skimmed money in a hacking scheme arranges to return it to a gangster in a dive bar, his new girlfriend in tow. The meeting spirals into violence and shifting allegiances as everyone in the bar turns out to be playing an angle.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Everyone's seen the 'criminals meet in a bar and betray each other' setup a thousand times, but Mendoza yanks the whole premise sideways—the girlfriend, the shifting angles, the fact that nobody's actually who you think they are—and treats it like a dark farce instead of playing it straight, which is exactly the kind of subversion that shouldn't work but does.
Rob Roy situates itself in a lineage of crime-bar standoffs (Tarantino, early Ritchie), but the theatrical escalation and the precision of its ensemble mechanics—the way each betrayal lands with formal exactness—suggests a filmmaker thinking carefully about genre syntax rather than just inheriting it.
The film lives or dies on its willingness to let the girlfriend become the actual center of gravity instead of a prop, and Mendoza commits to that choice completely, which transforms a familiar setup into something genuinely tense because you stop knowing whose side the camera is even on.