Vecinas
2012 · 24m · España
Directed by Héctor Escandell
Genres: dark comedy, drama, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
After spending a season behind bars, Edgar Pardo gets a job as a doorman of a building. Angelita Castro and Benjamina Guijarro, two neighbours addicted to sensationalism, will turn his newly acquired freedom into the worst of sentences: a story of terrorism on the landings.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A doorman's parole becomes collateral damage in two neighbours' addiction to scandal—it's a comedy that treats social predation and public hysteria as the real crime, which is exactly the subversive bite most scouts would miss or soften.
Escandell's formal control over the escalation—how theatrical gossip colonizes domestic space and transforms a simple premise into moral farce—places this in conversation with Buñuel's absurdism and Erice's attention to how stories weaponize themselves.
The decision to keep the protagonist almost silent while the neighbours' voices layer and multiply over the same landings creates the entire film's architecture: you feel his erasure acoustically before you see it, which costs nothing and does everything.