Votamos
2021 · 17m · España
Directed by Santiago Requejo
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
What begins as an ordinary neighbours' meeting to vote on changing the lift ends up becoming an unexpected debate about the limits of coexistence.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A lift-repair meeting that spirals into existential dread should be exactly my speed, but Requejo plays it too safe—there's potential for genuine weird here, and instead he settles for well-observed apartment-building claustrophobia. Fine film, but it knows exactly what it's doing, which means it's not doing enough.
Requejo demonstrates formal command over the single-room mise-en-scène, using the stalled meeting as a pressure cooker that recalls Polanski's early work and the theatrical tradition of unity of place; the editing breathes with the accumulating tension, each interruption and reframing a deliberate turn of the screw that situates this somewhere between social comedy and moral examination.
The decision to keep the camera observational rather than reactive—never cutting on a punchline, never editorializing—forces the ensemble to carry weight that a seventeen-minute film has no right to demand, and somehow they do, which is where the real film lives.