Simon Cries
2018 · 19m · Belgium
Directed by Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento
Genres: dark comedy, drama, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, melancholic
Simon, wrecked by a love sorrow, literally starts to shed all the tears of his whole body and must face this unstoppable physical state until an encounter changes his perception of sorrow.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A man literally weeping himself into oblivion is exactly the kind of premise that makes people uncomfortable before they realize it's hilarious—Sarmiento takes metaphor seriously enough to make it grotesque, which is where all the best subversion lives.
The film's command of surrealist tone—threading melancholy through absurdist physicality—places it in conversation with magical realist cinema, though the execution occasionally prioritizes concept over the sustained formal precision that would elevate it beyond an extended visual gag.
There's a single choice here that matters: the decision to make the tears *literal and unstoppable* rather than symbolic, which forces every subsequent shot to justify why we're watching a body betray itself—that commitment to the constraint is what sells the whole thing.