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It's a very special version of hell: fill an office suite with qualified executives, lock them in, and have them duke it out for a top job. Request they fill out duplicate forms, subject them to twisted mind games, offer food that has gone bad... and see how far they're willing to go. Far below the corporate windows, G8 protests are raging in the streets of Madrid, but it's going to get even uglier inside.

That's the premise of The Method, Marcelo Piñeyro's unique, Survivor-in-a-boardroom contribution to the suddenly popular genre of the biting office satire.

Early on, the apparently perfectly respectable Julio (Carmelo Gómez) is outed for reporting his company for environmental violations. Though he was praised as a hero by the press, the whistleblower is booted by his peers: he may have done the right thing, but he failed to put his company's interests first. Sorry, Julio. The tone is set for more spellbinding skullduggery and bare-knuckles sexual politics.

In addition to the cringe factor, Piñeyro exploits the humor of the absurd situation, including the case of a mysteriously a switched dress shirt. The talented cast manages to create characters who alternate between sympathetic to detestable and back again. Ana (Adriana Ozores), the middle-aged mother of two, is out-matched by the young, the beautiful, the confident: Nieves (Najwa Nimri) and Fernando (Eduardo Noriega), who have the audacity to flirt, the "Iberian macho" Fernando (Eduard Fernández) who hits on fellow applicants in the washroom, the stand-up stooge (Ernesto Alterio) whose admiration for the "method" can't save him, the dark horse (Pablo Echarri) who may or may not be a company mole.

And is that goofy secretary (Natalia Verbeke) really just a secretary?

As more and more applicants are expelled, less and less is certain, and the mysterious team of psychologists pulling the strings behind the scenes (if there really is a such a team) keeps moving the goalposts. "The battle is yours to lose," one of the booted informs the others--but what exactly are the rules of the method, and how different are they from the rules of life?