Sitges

A man enters the wrong building and can’t get out: every attempt brings him back to the same landing. Inside, each apartment follows its own rules: one tenant grows younger by the day, one flat is in black and white, and another is stuck in 1973. A neighbor will try to figure out what’s happening in this absurd ensemble comedy where quantum physics meets stairwell arguments.

Jorge accidentally walks into the wrong building. He’s distracted by his phone, thinking about how to get out of a dinner he doesn’t want to attend, and when he tries to leave, he discovers a rather serious problem: he can’t. He walks down the stairs and ends up back on the fourth floor. He takes the elevator and gets stuck on the mezzanine. He tries again. And again. And again. Always the same. The building returns him to the same point, as if space were stuck in a loop… or as if reality itself had been very poorly designed.

His husband, Santi, comes to find him and quickly moves from concern to complete bewilderment. He can accompany him, hold his hand, synchronize their steps… it doesn’t matter: on the final stretch of the stairs, Jorge disappears and reappears upstairs. For Santi, the building works normally. For Jorge, it doesn’t. They call the police, run tests, try to explain the unexplainable. The officers, after witnessing the phenomenon with a “this is going to end up on TikTok” expression, leave convinced they’re wasting their time. Completely useless.

The only person who isn’t surprised is Mireia Rojo, a physicist living in her late father’s apartment. She’s not alone: Jaime, a tenant in one of the flats, has decided to help her understand what’s happening in the building. According to Mireia, the building has been malfunctioning for decades. It’s not haunted—it’s defective. It was built on a point in the universe that became unstable, and ever since, the laws of physics have been doing their best—which isn’t much. Each apartment has its own anomaly: three underachieving students become geniuses, one neighbor grows younger every day, a couple becomes obsessed with physical exercise, one flat is stuck in 1973, another is entirely in black and white, and on the first floor lives someone who is Berta by day and Alberto by night, as if two incompatible versions shared the same shift.

Since there’s no way to get Jorge out, he ends up moving into one of the empty apartments. The impossible quickly becomes routine: you eat, you sleep, and if you’re not careful, you get used to not being able to leave home. Meanwhile, Mireia and Jaime go through the notes of her father, Lucas Rojo, and reconstruct the origin of the problem. In the 1990s, Rojo, a physicist, opened a wormhole to travel from the university to his house in less time. The idea was simple; the execution, not so much. Instead, he ended up in 1973, when the building was still under construction. His arrival caused an accident and, more importantly, left a crack in spacetime tied to the building. He tried to fix it by traveling back multiple times, but each attempt added more layers of error: overlapping timelines, mismatched spaces, contradictory effects… The building became a patchwork of fixes over a reality that no longer held together.

Meanwhile, a U.S. investment fund decides to buy the entire building. The residents, tired of living inside a physical anomaly with no instruction manual, vote and eventually sell. They get paid, sign the papers, and leave with the feeling of having survived something inexplicable. But Mireia and Jaime stay. They decide to finish what Lucas Rojo started: using the 1973 blueprints and the detected irregularities, they file a complaint. The city council declares the building structurally unsafe and orders its demolition.

As the building empties and demolition approaches, the anomalies begin to weaken, as if the phenomenon depended on its inhabitants to sustain itself. And then the unexpected happens: Jorge, without fanfare or grand explanation, one day walks down the stairs… and reaches the entrance. He gets out. Just like that. After everything, the exit feels almost anticlimactic, as if the universe had simply decided that was enough for today.

Then Toni Sanssouci appears, who until that moment had been little more than a strange name in Lucas Rojo’s notes: an American who wrote a delirious book about parallel universes, mixing physics with absurd theories. But he wasn’t a charlatan. Sanssouci has been moving between realities for years and has identified the building as something unique—not just a place with anomalies, but a gateway between universes. That’s why he wants it: to preserve it and continue using it. The problem is that, in this world, there is another version of Sanssouci who has nothing to do with any of this: a screw manufacturer with no interest in physics or interdimensional travel.

The “traveler” Sanssouci uses his identity and fortune to create an investment fund and buy the building without raising suspicion. But the plan fails for a reason far more powerful than quantum physics: bureaucracy. The fund’s executives, faced with a strange operation, consult the company’s real owner—the Sanssouci of this world, the one who deals in screws. He doesn’t understand any of it and has no interest in starting to, so he makes a simple decision: cancel the operation, absorb the losses, and forget about it. And so, a perfectly reasonable business decision unknowingly shuts down a plan designed to control a gateway between universes.

The building is demolished. Problem solved. More or less.

Weeks later, when everything seems back to normal, a crack appears in the wall of Mireia’s office. Jaime approaches and looks through it. On the other side, there is another universe, just as real as this one.

The building is gone. The crack is not. Because the problem was never the building. It was reality. And that, like any apartment community, is never fully fixed.

RELEVANT INFORMATION: Jaime Rubio Hancock is a Spanish writer and journalist, author of humorous novels and essays. His novel Informe Penkse won the La Llama Prize for humorous fiction.

Somewhere between 13, Rue del Percebe and Aquí no hay quien viva, Sitges has strong audiovisual potential as an absurdist comedy, whether as a feature film or a sitcom. The building functions as an impossible community where each apartment is a joke in itself: a woman who grows younger, a flat stuck in 1973, another in black and white, or a crack in the wall leading to a parallel Sitges. The characters coexist with these absurdities naturally, reinforcing the slice-of-life humor and echoing classic ensemble comedies about neighbors.

AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Movie

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish