Sótano
2009 · 10m · España
Directed by Jon Cortegoso Otaduy
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: absurdist, dark, darkly comic
A deranged old woman kidnaps a poor boy and keeps him in her basement. With the ransom money, she hopes to make one of her life's dreams come true.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A kidnapper-as-dreamer who treats ransom like a lottery ticket to self-actualization—it's deranged enough to actually work, and the fact that it plays the absurdity straight instead of winking at the camera is exactly why every other scout probably passed on it.
Cortegoso Otaduy constructs a darkly comic thriller that sits uneasily between Spanish genre tradition and absurdist parable, though the tonal balance between crime and whimsy occasionally strains under its own conceptual weight.
The decision to make the kidnapper's motivation genuinely sympathetic—not likable, but *understood*—reframes the entire moral calculus in a way that a single line of dialogue or performance choice could've destroyed, but here it holds.