Mesa Soto initially mines wry humor from Oscar’s sad-sackness; he and editor Ricardo Saravia are especially good at scene transitions that land like a punchline, and the marvelous Rios – small of stature and existentially slumped – cuts a comical figure.

A Poet is worth seeing for the moments of genuine emotion and elegiac contemplation, the wry humor, Rios’s unguarded performance, and the gritty production design and cinematography.

Filmmaker Soto casts a skeptical eye on all of this, shooting in grainy 16-millimeter, and using musical scoring to underline the absurdity and pretension.

A Poet is precisely that: a pitch-black, lucid, and painful comedy that dares to say that even those who are superfluous, those who arrived late, those who don't fit in, still deserve a poem. [Full review in Spanish]