The App
2016 · 16m · España
Directed by Julián Merino
Genres: dark comedy, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
Benito succeeds in life thanks to The App, the new mobile application that guarantees happiness — but what if the app tells him he must kill himself to be happy?
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A premise that actually *lands* the philosophical trap instead of winking at it—The App takes the happiness-optimization nightmare seriously enough to make the absurdist punchline genuinely unsettling, which is exactly the kind of subversive move that makes other scouts nervous and me certain.
Merino's command of tonal register recalls the mordant sci-fi lineage of Twilight Zone and contemporary European shorts; the formal restraint in how he escalates from mundane app-scrolling to existential coercion demonstrates a curatorial understanding of how genre structures meaning.
The crucial decision here is the deadpan performance register—Benito's acceptance of the app's logic without melodrama creates a kind of moral vertigo that a smaller shift in acting temperature would've completely squandered, and that single restraint transforms dark comedy into something genuinely vertiginous.