Un millón
2014 · 20m · España
Directed by Álex Rodrigo
Genres: dark comedy, satire, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, tense
Basilio Benito, a controversial trash-TV producer and presenter, is kidnapped one night at his hotel and offered a macabre challenge: broadcast his own kidnapping by streaming while he is psychologically abused reality-show style, and if it reaches a million views in twelve hours, they will kill him live.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A trash-TV producer forced to *become* the content—the premise alone is perverse enough to make consensus critics squirm, but Rodrigo actually commits to the satire without winking, which is rarer and meaner than it sounds.
The film wrestles seriously with the mechanics of spectacle and complicity in a lineage stretching from *Network* through contemporary reality television, though its formal control wavers between pointed social critique and exploitation of its own premise.
The decision to play Benito's psychological unraveling in real-time through the lens of actual streaming metrics—cutting between his dignity collapsing and a live view counter ticking upward—is a single formal choice that makes the entire conceit work.