Wadafak! La mala hora
2022 · 7m · Ecuador
Directed by Luis Chuquilla
Genres: crime, dark comedy, thriller
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, tense
A group of friends take advantage of Stefano's house to hide stolen merchandise, but they do not know that a thief has broken in and lies inert, pretending to be dead; they flee to bury him in a forest, not knowing that he was not dead.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A theft plot that eats itself — friends burying a 'corpse' who isn't dead is the kind of escalating absurdist trap that most scouts would flatten into simple dark comedy, but Chuquilla leans into the genuine dread underneath the farce, which is exactly when you know you're watching something weird enough to matter.
The film's tonal architecture is what impresses: it holds the line between slapstick and menace without resolving into either, a constraint that demands precise editing and performance calibration—the kind of formal control that sits squarely in the lineage of Buñuel's comic grotesques.
The genius move is the decision to keep the 'dead' thief genuinely passive—no winking, no reaction shots—which transforms what could be a gimmick into genuine unease; it's one structural choice that makes seven minutes of buried-alive anxiety feel inevitable on a minimal budget.