SUPERPUNKY, EL MUSICAL
2017 · 18m · España
Directed by Pablo Cacheda
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, musical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Lifelong friends Belén and Rebeca share the same musical tastes until university pulls them apart. A concert by Quique, a former child prodigy turned cursed singer-songwriter, becomes the axis of their story.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A melancholic musical about friendship and drift sounds like the kind of earnest coming-of-age everyone agrees is 'important' — except Cacheda's willingness to let Quique be genuinely cursed, genuinely ridiculous, keeps it from settling into the safe emotional beats you'd expect.
The structure is deceptively classical: two friends, a catalyst event, the formal architecture of a concert film — but the restraint in how Cacheda holds these tones together, moving between tenderness and dark comedy without announcing the shifts, positions this firmly in the lineage of Spanish cinema that treats youth with neither sentimentality nor cynicism.
The decision to make Quique — the supposed axis of their story — absurd and almost pathetic rather than luminous or tragic is what rescues this from predictability; it's a single tonal choice that rewires what could've been a familiar friendship-drifts-apart into something stranger and more true.