Opening with one of the most pleasurable and ambient scenes of 2026, Everything Else Is Noise announces its intentions immediately.
Gridlocked traffic in a Mexico City intersection struggles to move and to find space in a complex interactive dance, while we listen to someone warming up the bow-on-strings of a cello. Nicolás Pereda’s latest exquisitely calibrated comedy of manners devotes a sizeable amount of its slim (but typical for this director) 71-minute runtime to let this scene play out in all its anticipatory banality before introducing us to its lead character. Teresa (Teresita Sánchez) is a composer who has lent out her apartment to a fellow female composer for a television documentary interview that morning.
Her neighbour first comes up to complain about the cello waking up his baby, a conversation that is difficult to hear with all the traffic noise, the dogs barking and other city background, that the comedy around the nature of the social contract immediately begins to reveal itself. When Rosa (Rosa Estela Juárez Vargas) comes over for a visit before the interview, the ladies' small talk is more like battle, with feints and parries, dead ends and double-backs in the form of collegial politeness. They do not even seem to know they are testing one another, but nevertheless, this is how many people talk in real life, and rarely so in the movies.
I have been following Pereda since his 2020 film Fauna absolutely blew my mind with its unexpected narrative cadences and structural audacity. In particular, its dry comedy of awkward social interactions recalls the work of Hong Sang Soo, but is also vastly different. As with nearly all of Pereda’s work, the entire cast of his last few features returns to take on new roles and new ways to manipulate social mores to squeeze out quiet laughter on the absurdity of human interaction.
That includes the comedy of errors of the TV crew, who have an excellent reputation in their field, but are having a very bad day. The building's electricity keeps going out, incessant dog barking -- leading to another amusingly-awkward conversation with a different neighbour -- and equipment issues render much of the day a bust.
Rosa is reluctant to give answers to the interviewer’s (Lázaro G. Rodríguez) vapid questions, and Teresa makes up fabulous stories that only confuse them. Teresa’s daughter (Luisa Pardo), who is also a composer, enters the frame to further confound the situation and offer an impromptu, experimental and hubristic performance which would do Spinal Tap’s free-form jazz exploration quite proud.
Meanwhile, the traffic jam, honking, and city noise permeate everything.
Pereda uses the situation to self-comment on his own work. Teresa, in a rare moment of seriousness, admits that she has trouble ending her compositions, and that they simply ‘drift off’, is a bit of sly auto-critique of Pereda’s most recent work.
The camera and sound guy (the always wonderful Francisco Barreiro) describes his latest project of ‘remaking a very specific film in nearly the same kind of way, only with minor details changed'. (“It is all in the execution.”) This entire conversation is held at a cafe, which we do not see, we only hear the conversation as we watch the three ladies idle in the apartment, until the TV guys return. There is that subtle violation of form that Pereda loves to play with, and lands his work in the avant-garde sidebars at festivals, even as they are all works of studied human behaviour.
Using mostly natural light, or candle light when the power is out, and very little camera movement, the film never leaves Teresa’s apartment. When a camera pans or there is a cut to another angle, there always a revealing bit of humour. At times, Pereda, who is also the cinematographer, manages to squeeze nearly all the players into the frame. And the traffic jam never ends.
Everything Else Is Noise is a marvel of subtle ingenuity. It is not what the characters talk about, it is how they talk about it: What they tune out, and how they engage.