The Good Boss is an award-winning Spanish film about an unusually toxic boss. In it, Javier Bardem proves there's no-one better at selling deviousness wrapped in charm.
A film like Spain's The Good Boss looks as if it's setting out to deliver a Happy Ending. Yes, star Javier Bardem seems to come out on top, with cheers and applause all around.
But how good a boss is Blanco really? He runs a big factory that makes measuring scales - big industrial scales, small household scales - with the implication that his life has to be in balance.
The good news is that Blanco Scales is on the shortlist for a coveted award for Business Excellence.
The bad news is that unfortunately - for the sake of balance, you understand - sometimes some members of the Blanco family have to be let go.
The departing young interns merely cry into their hankies. But long-time workers like Jose refuse to go down without a fight. It's all because Blanco is, frankly, too good a boss. His motto, he says, is "My door is always open. Your problems are my problems."
Obviously not trouble-makers like Jose, now camped outside the factory with a bull-horn. But certainly his long-time friend Miralles, whose work is suffering because his wife tells him she "needs more space".
Easy, says his boss. Let's go to the club and meet some friendly women. Miralles resists, but Blanco already has his eye on the new intake of interns. How can he help them?
There are all sorts of people who need helping - particularly where Blanco sees an advantage to himself down the line.
And because Javier Bardem as Blanco is so charming and likeable it takes a while before we realise what The Good Boss is up to.
Writer-director Fernando Léon de Aranoa is one of the most successful filmmakers in Spain, and The Good Boss has won just about every Spanish film award going.
This is ironic since the film is about Blanco's obsession with awards and trophies, and how every decision he makes is about getting the latest one.
You think you're getting into one of those workplace farces the French are so good at, with the feckless businessman getting himself into more and more trouble the more he tries to do the right thing.
But that's not where this is heading. Blanco thinks he's doing the right thing, because everything that works for him and his business must be, by definition, being a good boss.
As he says, sometimes you have to "trick the scales". So he quietly keeps putting his thumb on the scales, so to speak, to make the result come out the right way. The right way for him, of course.
Some critics claim that The Good Boss is a depiction of the famous "banality of evil" - which I think is putting more weight on how unusually evil Blanco is.
But the point - and of course the point when Hannah Arendt originally coined the phrase "banality of evil" - is that he's no more evil than other shifty people in his position.
This is business as usual for the self-styled "Good Boss". And when the judges of the Business Excellence awards finally come to the factory to be buttered up, it's clear they know exactly what Blanco's like. They're all like that.
Incidentally, Javier Bardem is brilliant in the film. No one sells deviousness wrapped in charm better than him, and the final lingering shot of his unsatisfied smile is probably the reason for the many awards he won himself this year.
Sometimes the bad can end both happily and unhappily - and those are always the best movies!
