Review of La cabina

This 35-minute surreal Spanish short is a one-joke movie that, while perhaps a mite too extended to achieve maximum effect, has a splendidly horrific punch-line that belies the blackly comedic touches of its earlier stages. In fact, for at least half its length, this virtually resembles a Tatiesque farce (complete with negligible dialogue and pompous characterizations) with a Bunuelian premise (the inexplicable confinement of its protagonist in the titular cubicle seems to come right out of my own second favorite among the Spanish maestro's films, THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL [1962]). The plot itself is disarmingly simple: a newly-installed red phone booth incites the curiosity of a man who has just accompanied his boy to school but, as he is making a call, the previously invitingly open door shuts itself and, subsequently, he is unable to open it from the inside. As time passes, bystanders start to accumulate and become a veritable microcosm of humanity: from laid-back pensioners to mischievous school-children, from young couples to old housewives...and, of course, a gluttonous onlooker, the heavy-set man who clearly thinks he can effortlessly break the door open and the incredulous police officers who, invariably, all make fools of themselves; before long, the professionals come to the rescue: first the firemen who are about to use the axe on the thing when the phone company people who installed it in the first place appear on the scene and literally lift the telephone box off its hinges and drive away with it wholesale! Then follows the lengthy trek through the city streets (where a couple of other equally imprisoned callers can also be seen being carried away!) until the truck arrives at its destination: a tunnel replete with similar telephone boxes whose occupants have either gone off the wall, killed themselves or even decomposed!! Although nothing further is explained about this phenomenon, one cannot fail to be reminded of similarly bleak 'twist' endings like those seen earlier in John Frankenheimer's SECONDS (1966) and later in Richard Fleischer's SOYLENT GREEN (1973). Finally, I watched this Spanish TV production in its original Spanish language version with no subtitles whatsoever but, as I said before, one can easily follow what is going on the screen and, thankfully, the mostly dialogue-free movie is further boosted by an excellent music score.