The Good Boss 2021

Benevolent patriarch Julio Blanco, CEO of a family company manufacturing precision industrial scales, is determined to win a prestigious business award. In a few days’ time, the national committee deciding the award outcome will come to inspect the premises. Everything must be perfect – Julio, risking his own sanity, will ensure that it is, no matter who he must seduce and destroy.  

“‘Don’t treat me like a boss,’ Blanco keeps telling people with a thin gray smile. You shudder to think how fast it would vanish if you did anything but. We first encounter him giving a smarmy pep talk to the employees at his company… All smiles and handshakes and repeated mentions of community, it’s a performance for the benefit of a local journalist, visiting to big-up the factory in a commissioned puff piece… 

Once the visitors are gone, however… a little harsh housekeeping. Among various downsizing measures, longtime employee Jose is summarily dismissed, and doesn’t take it well… Within factory walls, meanwhile, everything is far from hunky-dory. Blanco’s right-hand man, Miralles, is distracted by marital woes and flailing professionally – a weakness his boss isn’t above exploiting for the good of the company… Blanco’s own marriage to world-weary fashion boutique owner Adela hasn’t been sacred for years… With each chaotic plot turn of [this] anti-corporate comedy, it becomes clearer that Blanco is the blandest possible incarnation of pure evil: a man with nary a principle, much less a personality, to his name.” — Guy Lodge, Variety