Un, dos, tres, ¡Taxi!
1997 · 18m · España
Directed by Ricardo Aristeo
Genres: dark comedy, mystery
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
On New Year's Eve 1999, a taxi driver starting his shift picks up a strange couple leaving a party: an immense man in a tuxedo and a young woman.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A taxi as confessional on the eve of apocalypse—the setup screams sitcom until Aristeo lets the strangeness calcify into something genuinely uncanny. This is the kind of premise that makes you lean forward asking *what is actually happening here*, which is exactly when cinema gets interesting.
Aristeo's staging recalls a theatrical tradition of claustrophobic moral inquiry, where the enclosed space becomes a pressure chamber for revelation; the formal restraint—letting the oddness breathe rather than wink—situates this squarely in the lineage of European absurdist comedy.
The decision to play the immense man and young woman with absolute naturalism, never letting them tip into caricature despite the absurdist setup, is what separates this from a sketch—it grounds the mystery in genuine human weight and makes the strangeness land as unsettling rather than cute.