Un roto para un descosido
2020 · 20m · Ecuador
Directed by Helena Galán, Mario Vera
Genres: comedy, fantasy, romance
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
A widower and a divorced woman, both ready to rebuild their lives, meet on a promising New Year's blind date. Dinner for two becomes a chaotic dinner for four when the ghosts of their ex-partners join them.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people see a rom-com premise and check out; these directors saw it and thought 'what if we haunted it?' The ghost-dinner-party conceit is exactly the kind of "wait, WHAT?" subversion that makes consensus taste look lazy.
The tonal register here—balancing whimsy with genuine melancholy, absurdism with romantic sincerity—sits in a lineage of European romantic comedies that know how to hold contradiction; the formal control required to not tip into kitsch or sentimentality across 20 minutes is considerable.
The decision to make the ghosts *present* rather than metaphorical, and to play that choice as genuinely funny rather than precious, is what separates this from a dozen other indie romances with conceptual gimmicks—it's a single commitment that unlocks everything.