Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Julio Blanco is the proprietor of Básculas Blanco, a Spanish company producing industrial scales in a provincial Spanish town, which awaits the imminent visit from a committee that will decide if they merit a local Business Excellence award: everything has to be perfect when the time comes. Working against the clock, Blanco pulls out all the stops to address and resolve issues with his employees, crossing every imaginable line in the process.
The Good Boss is elevated primarily by Javier Bardem's tour-de-force performance as the self-deluding, morally flexible Blanco — a role he inhabits with comic precision and quiet menace that earns genuine distinction. The plot is a smartly constructed satire of corporate paternalism and middle-management hypocrisy, though its episodic structure occasionally feels schematic as each employee crisis is neatly queued up. Cinematography is competent and appropriately flat — the provincial mundanity is captured well but without visual ambition. Novelty sits in the middle: the film has a sharp, distinctly Spanish dry-comedy voice and a satirical bite reminiscent of Berlanga, but the 'boss-as-monster-in-plain-sight' conceit is not wholly fresh. The ending lands with an appropriately cynical and mordant punchline that fits the film's tone, though it stops just short of the truly devastating conclusion the material might have sustained.