Un asunto pendiente
2001 · 19m · España
Directed by José Manuel Quiroga
Genres: crime, dark comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
A delivery driver breakfasts daily at a friend's bar and discovers a hidden hole in the slot machine. Through the hole, money pours out at will.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A 2001 Spanish film where a guy just... steals from a slot machine through a hole, and somehow this absurdist premise never tips into heist-movie predictability—it stays weird and morally slippery the entire time. The kind of deadpan crime story that makes you question whether you're watching comedy or tragedy, and most scouts would've passed on it.
Quiroga's restraint in staging—the mundane bar setting, the measured accumulation of routine and transgression—situates this firmly in a lineage of European crime minimalism that values implication over spectacle. The formal architecture of repetition and discovery recalls Kiarostami's meditation on routine and moral erosion.
The decision to frame this entirely through the driver's perspective, never cutting away to show us what's happening with the money or the bar owner's awareness, turns a simple premise into something architecturally elegant—it's the perspective choice that makes the whole film work.